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Voices of To-morrow 



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BY EDWIN BJORKMAN 

GLEAMS 

IS THERE ANYTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN ? 

VOICES OF TO-MORROW 



Mr. Bjorkman is the authorized translator of the 
Plays of August Strindberg now being published by 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 



VOICES OF TO-MORROW: 
CRITICAL STUDIES OF 
THE NEW SPIRIT IN LIT- 
ERATURE 

Edwin Bjorkman 




Mitchell Kennerley 
New York and London 

MCMXIII 



Copyright 191 J by Mitchell Kennerley 



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; 

©CI.A350282 



Dear M. K.: 

What makes me dedicate this book to you is 
neither the faith you showed in my work when 
others viewed it with complete indifference, nor 
your generous and faithful friendship, often more 
mindful of my interests than of your own, but the 
fact that you seem to me one of those foresight ed 
few who have come to realize that "success in 
business" is a meaningless term unless used as a 
symbolical equivalent for "service rendered*" 

March, ipij. 



Since its first appearance in "The Forum" the 
Strindberg study has been doubled in length and 
almost wholly rewritten. In its new form it in- 
cludes a few paragraphs taken from my introduc- 
tion to Strindberg s "There are Crimes and 
Crimes." The second Her rick study is new. The 
rest of the articles contained in this volume have 
previously appeared in "The American Review of 
Reviews" "The Bookman" "The New York Call" 
"The New York Times" and "The Forum." 
For permission to reprint them I am beholden to 
the editors of those publications. The Gissing 
study was written in 1904. All the others have 
been produced during the last four years. None 
of them pretends to be more than suggestive. 
Demands from without have to a certain extent 
compelled the choice of subjects, and so it happens, 
to my great regret, that, in this volume again, 
German thought and literature remain unrepre- 
sented. 



CONTENTS 




August Strindberg 


11 


1 His Life 


11 


2 His Work 


41 


3 His Spirit 


85 


4 Bibliographical 


117 


Bjornstjerne Bjornson 


121 


Poet, Politician, Prophet 


121 


The Story of Selma Lagerlof 


139 



The New Mysticism 154 

1 Its Prophet : Francis Grierson 154 

2 Its Poet: Maurice Maeterlinck 186 

3 Its Philosopher : Henri Bergson 205 
Graal Knights of Modern Letters 224 

1 George Gissing 224 

2 Joseph Conrad 240 
Two Studies of Robert Herrick 260 
The Greater Edith Wharton 290 
Man's Beginning and End 305 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 



His Life 

EOPLE are sometimes blamed for 
speaking of themselves," says 
Anatole France, "and yet it is the subject 
which they treat of best." August Strind- 
berg asserted with his usual directness, that 
the only fiction really worth while is the 
one that deals unreservedly with the author's 
own self. 

It is doubtful whether the world ever 
knew an artist who was more consistently 
and unshrinkingly personal in his choice of 
material. At the same time, however, I 
doubt whether any one was ever more im- 
personal in his treatment of such material. 
"In the last analysis," writes a competent 
Swedish critic, "he was always looking at 
himself with the eyes of a stranger." 

11 



12 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

But even in the case of one whose art 
was thus inextricably mixed with his life, 
I maintain that his work, if possessed of 
genuine greatness, must be intelligible with- 
out reference to anything lying outside its 
own frame. And I do not for a moment be- 
lieve that any amount of personal detail 
can explain genius — much less explain it 
away. In giving an outline of certain in- 
fluences and experiences known to have 
played the part of a refracting medium to 
the essential spirit of Strindberg's genius, 
I wish only to provide an easier approach 
to the understanding of his work, where 
alone may be found that true color of his 
soul which is likely to make his name live 
in the future. 

The leit motif of his childhood was built 
out of two jarring notes: misunderstand- 
ing and isolation. He was an unwelcome 
child. Throughout life he remained more 
or less unwelcome, isolated and misunder- 
stood. And if at times we find in his work 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 13 

a note of bitterness bordering on hatred, 
we must recall not only the sad beginnings, 
but also the subsequent stress and struggle 
through which he had to force his way to 
the point where he stood at the time of his 
death — tardily recognized as the greatest 
living writer in the Scandinavian North and 
one of the greatest in the whole world. 

Strindberg's father was a shopkeeper who 
had gone bankrupt a short time before the 
child was born, and who had to begin life 
all over again as a steamship agent. The 
boy's mother was a barmaid who had brought 
three children into the world before her re- 
lation to their father was legitimized by mar- 
riage. And a couple of months after the 
wedding August was born. That was in 
January, 1849. 

The family was living in Stockholm, the 
gay capital of Sweden, but its members had 
less contact with the rest of the world than 
if they had been stranded in a desert. The 
father turned with almost monomaniacal 
devotion to the task of building up a secure 



14 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

livelihood for himself and those depending 
on him. The mother was narrowly religious 
and wholly preoccupied with the cares of a 
constantly growing brood. The home was, 
for years, of the poorest — and as child after 
child was added to the flock, its three rooms 
had finally to house eleven persons : the par- 
ents, seven children, and two servants. 

The boy's first remembered sensations, as 
recorded by himself, were fear and hunger 
— and of those two, fear predominated. 
Thus we may guess why so often in later 
life his indomitable courage seemed tinged 
with desperation. Timid and shy, morbidly 
sensitive, craving love and justice with equal 
passion where both seemed denied him, he 
became from the very start what he often 
called himself — one of life's scapegoats. At 
the age of eight he dreamt of taking his own 
life because he had been unjustly accused 
and then tormented into falsely acknowledg- 
ing himself guilty of the charge. And what 
hurt him more than the unmerited punish- 
ment was the doubting of his word. No 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 15 

other incident in his life seems to have struck 
such deep roots in his mind as this one, 
sowing within him a distrust not only of 
his fellow men, but of life itself and what 
lies behind it, that he was never able to 
overcome. Plain echoes of that childish ex- 
perience are to be heard in one work after 
another. 

His mother's religiosity was of the egois- 
tical kind that refers only to the salvation 
of the individual soul. The father, being 
more intellectual, was more passive in his 
attitude, but hardly broader in his faith. 
The boy, on the other hand, seems from the 
first to have fermented with an emotion 
which, while it sought outlet in religious 
forms, was largely social in its trend. Here 
again we find a chasm yawning between the 
boy and his surroundings that helped to 
swing him toward an extreme of materialis- 
tic scepticism before he could find true ex- 
pression for one of the fundamental tenden- 
cies in his nature. And the same influence 
went far, I think, to pull him back time and 



16 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

again into a morbid jealousy on behalf of 
his own personality. 

When he was thirteen, his mother died, 
and he mourned not so much her death as 
the final loss of that tender sympathy which 
his soul hungered for, but which all his long- 
ings had never been able to draw from her. 
Perhaps it was this first fatal disappoint- 
ment which doomed him to repeated disillu- 
sionment in his subsequent intercourse with 
the other sex. He himself has said some- 
where that he could never tell whether he 
was looking to women for a mother's love 
or that of a mistress. 

Before a year had passed, he was given 
a stepmother — and once more his soul re- 
ceived a shock never to be forgotten. He 
tried to like her and make himself liked. In 
both efforts he failed conspicuously. And 
the only result was increased estrangement 
between himself and his father. Thus every- 
thing combined to throw him back upon 
himself, and to further that habit of intense 
introspection which was to form such a 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 17 

characteristic trait of his art. The one con- 
soling circumstance of those crucial years 
from thirteen to eighteen was that the 
financial position of the household became 
very much improved, so that the boy, after 
a couple of unhappy educational ex- 
periences, could attend a good private 
school and hope for a university course. 
But when at last, at the age of eighteen, 
he departed for the ancient university in 
the little town of Upsala — Sweden's Ox- 
ford — his total means consisted of eighty 
kronor (about $22) which he had earned 
for himself by tutoring. From his father 
he received nothing but a handful of cigars 
and the advice to "look out for himself." 

During the greater part of his stay at the 
university he was wretchedly poor. He did 
not even have money enough to buy wood 
for the heating of the bare garret where he 
lived. Sometimes he borrowed a sackful 
from some more fortunate comrade, carry- 
ing it home on his own back, and sometimes 
he stayed in bed for days to keep warm. 



18 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

His first term was almost lost because he 
had no books and no money to buy any. 
But worse than all this was the rebellion in- 
spired within him by the futility of the 
whole academical system. Once he broke 
away in despair and began to teach in one 
of the public schools at Stockholm. He was 
assigned to the lowest grade, and realized 
quickly that he had exchanged one hell for 
another. Like The Lieutenant in "The 
Dream Play," he imagined himself con- 
demned to start the whole dreary routine 
over again, not as a teacher, but as one of 
the pupils — bored, scolded and snubbed. 

It is of no use here to talk of lacking 
flexibility or adaptability. Young Strind- 
berg's story is that of numerous other men 
of genius. They are all fitted for some par- 
ticular task — and until they find that task 
they are helpless. Rousseau, Balzac, Wag- 
ner, Ibsen, Shaw are among those that may 
be mentioned in illustration. And it is to 
be noted that during the period in question 
Strindberg was firmly convinced of his own 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 19 

inability to write. He had tried, and 
— "nothing would come." His family re- 
garded him as a good-for-nothing. And 
he himself was, on the whole, fearful 
that their judgment might prove cor- 
rect. 

We can then imagine his surprise and rap- 
ture, when, during that temporary absence 
from the university, he discovered that, 
after all, the gift of poetical creation was 
his. It was as if some frozen fountain had 
thawed out and sent a flood of inspiration 
through his whole being. In a couple of 
months (in 1869) he produced several com- 
edies and a five-act tragedy in verse on a 
classical theme. This he named "Her- 
mione," and to this day it remains distinctly 
readable. A one-act verse play was ac- 
cepted and played at the Royal Theatre. 
Strindberg was then twenty-one. A little 
later (1871) another small play, "The Out- 
cast" — a historical prose study undoubtedly 
suggested by Bjornson's "Between the Bat- 
tles" — won him the attention of King 



20 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Charles XV and a stipend from the mon- 
arch's private purse. 

While this spell of sunshine lasted, he re- 
turned to the university to make another 
vain attempt at winning a degree. He read 
prodigiously — and some of his reading ac- 
tually overlapped the courses prescribed by 
the curriculum. But as a rule his mind fol- 
lowed its own impulses. The keynote of 
his entire existence at the time was an in- 
tense intellectual curiosity. "To study 
everything, to know everything, was a mania 
with me," he said of himself later. That 
mania remained typical of his mental at- 
titude throughout all the vicissitudes of his 
life. And I think that, more than once, it 
proved the saving factor when he found 
himself brought to the very brink of ir- 
remediable disaster. Nor was there ever 
anything superficial about this insatiable 
curiosity. Whether searching his own soul 
or observing surrounding nature, he must 
needs go to the bottom of things. Thus 
I found not long ago that he had examined 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 21 

the botanical text books in six different lan- 
guages merely to clear up some obscure 
point. And the mercilessness of his intro- 
spection is splendidly illustrated by a pas- 
sage in which he describes a character who 
is none but himself in slight disguise : "Falk 
was a vivisector who experimented on his 
own soul, always going around with open 
wounds, until he gave his life for the sake 
of knowledge." 

During his second stay at the university 
he made three spiritual acquaintances which 
became largely determining for his future 
development. They were the Danish 
philosopher Kierkegaard's "Either — Or," 
which made him for ever a champion of the 
ethical, as juxtaposed to the esthetical, life 
conception; Buckle's "History of Civiliza- 
tion in England," which revealed to him the 
relativity of truth and the rooting of all 
ideas in material conditions; and, finally, 
Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the 
Unconscious," which introduced him to the 
gospel of pessimism, the acceptance of life 



22 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

as an inevitable and, perhaps, meaningless 
evil. Afterwards Strindberg travelled many 
strange paths and worshipped at many new 
shrines, but he remained always faithful in 
spirit to those earlier guides; and to the 
last he proclaimed in his books and plays 
that art and knowledge must be subservient 
to life, and that life itself must be lived as 
we know best, chiefly because we are part 
of it and cannot escape from its promptings. 
He wrote, too, during that period, but de- 
stroyed everything without having made an 
attempt to get it played or published. Two 
historical five-act tragedies were among the 
products sacrificed to his growing power of 
self-criticism. With the death of the king 
in 1872, his stipend ceased and distress re- 
turned. Unable to study, unable to write, 
unable to do anything but paint — in which 
art he also reached considerable proficiency 
without ever having studied it in prescribed 
fashion — he feared that he was losing his 
mind. On one occasion comrades had to 
watch at his bed for several nights while 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 23 

every available candle was kept burning to 
shield him from the horrors lurking in the 
darkness. And once the future author of 
"Inferno," who was to drift as close to the 
border-line between the rational and the ir- 
rational as any one may dare without fatal 
results, actually wrote to a private sani- 
tarium for advice. 

In the end he gave up the vain struggle 
for academical preferment and returned to 
Stockholm. A lucky chance took him out 
to one of the innumerable islands that make 
the inlet to Stockholm one of the most beau- 
tiful in the world. There, during two quietly 
happy summer months, he wrote his first 
masterpiece, "Master Olof," a historical 
prose drama grouped around the Luther of 
the Swedish Reformation. Forty years 
have passed since Strindberg, then only 
twenty-three years old, completed that work. 
Forty years of shifting literary fashions 
have failed to sap its strength or dim its 
charm. But while it still seems great to-day, 
even when compared with the epoch-making 



24 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

works of universal literature, it stood unique 
in Swedish literature at the time of its com- 
pletion — a landmark proclaiming the incep- 
tion of a new era. 

But it was rejected — scornfully and 
sneeringly rejected — by the literary arbiters 
of the Royal Theatre, then the only stage 
available for the production of such a work. 
No publisher could be found for it. Not 
until five years later was it placed before 
the public in book form, and then in altered 
shape, after its author had rewritten it five 
times in compliance with the edict of the 
critics that verse alone was suitable to the 
historical drama — an opinion voiced about 
the same time by Edmund Gosse in regard 
to Ibsen's "Emperor and Galilean." The 
first stage performance of "Master Olof" 
did not occur until 1880, and then on one 
of the privately managed stages that had 
begun to spring up in the capital. 

For a time the reception accorded his first 
authentical work of genius seemed to rob 
Strindberg of the very desire to write. His 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 25 

struggle for mere existence became more 
trying than ever. At last, after having 
failed as an actor and as a hack writer for 
various newspapers, he obtained a position 
in the National Library. There he spent his 
time in studying Chinese and writing mono- 
graphs on the relations between China and 
Sweden in the eighteenth century. One of 
these efforts was even read before the French 
Institute and brought him a medal from 
the Russian Geographical Society. 

He was twenty-six, and the arch-rebel 
within him appeared to have received a 
quietus for ever, when he met the woman 
who was to exercise an influence on his fate 
comparable to that first impression of the 
world's blind injustice which had burned it- 
self so ineradicably into the boy's conscious- 
ness. She was another man's wife. Of the 
vicissitudinous courtship that ensued I shall 
not speak here. In the end a divorce left 
the woman free to marry the man who had 
already been her lover for some time. 
Throughout that transitory period, as well 



26 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

as afterwards, the passing and the coming 
husband seem to have regarded each other 
not only without ill-will, but with real friend- 
ship. In the whole matter inhered, however, 
an ambiguity that must have hurt Strind- 
berg to the quick. For the man to whose 
"marital ventures" jeering references have 
so often been made was above everything 
else clean in all his instincts. And that 
he had to reach his dreamed happiness 
through what the world calls a scandal 
was sure to call forth a reaction sooner or 
later. 

But happiness he had for a time — the 
first genuine happiness of his life. And 
under that stimulus he began to write again : 
first a series of short stories, and then a 
novel, "The Red Room." This was his 
second masterpiece. It established his repu- 
tation as a writer, though his own country- 
men did their best to overlook the book. In 
the end it won its way largely through the 
recognition bestowed on it by critics in the 
other Scandinavian countries. During the 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 27 

next few years Strindberg's literary pro- 
ductivity was tremendous. But I shall here 
speak of only one more work from that 
period — the first of the two short-story 
volumes named "Marriage.' ' He wrote it 
in Switzerland, whither he had withdrawn 
to give himself wholly to his art. The im- 
petus to it came unmistakably from Ibsen's 
"A Doll's House," against which Strind- 
berg reacted antipathetically from the first. 
His immediate object was merely to present 
modern marriage as he saw it — based not on 
"ideal demands," but on economical condi- 
tions. But as usual he spoke what he held 
to be the truth with such force that evasion 
became impossible. 

Criminal proceedings were instituted, not 
against Strindberg, but against his pub- 
lisher, and not for "immorality" but for — 
sacrilegious treatment of the established re- 
ligion. By hurrying home, Strindberg suc- 
ceeded in turning the fire on himself. While 
the proceedings lasted, the whole country 
was literally split in twain over the issues 



28 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

involved. It was the old and the new fight- 
ing for supremacy. The jury at last 
brought in a verdict of "not guilty," and 
the author was acclaimed with a fervor 
rarely if ever displayed toward a literary 
man in Sweden. He was thereafter the ac- 
knowledged leader of a band of radical 
poets and artists who called themselves 
"Young Sweden." But in the midst of the 
feasting and shouting, the object of all that 
enthusiasm whispered to himself: "Yes, 
you cheer me to-day, and to-morrow you 
will be hissing me." And the main impres- 
sion retained by his mind was not of the 
joyous tumult caused by his acquittal, but 
of the humiliation that had led up to it — 
for he felt that his aim had been unmistaka- 
bly pure. 

That was in 1884. His marriage lasted 
seven years longer, but with every passing 
year the relationship between him and his 
wife grew more painful. Time and again 
he tried to break the bond, and as often he 
returned, drawn back partly by lingering 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 29 

love, and partly by that "link" which held 
him most powerfully — the children. And 
not only love for wife and children, but his 
entire natural bent, made it hard for him to 
seek relief from a burden become unbear- 
able. For though he had won another 
man's wife, and though he was to marry 
twice again, he was instinctively and pas- 
sionately monogamous. And one of the 
main tragedies of his all too tragic life was 
his inability to realize the ideal of two souls 
walking side by side through life, bound to- 
gether by a love that had in it no touch of 
impurity. 

Omniscience would be needed to proclaim 
the exact degree of responsibility attaching 
to the man and the woman in that marriage. 
The hellish tortures which it inflicted on 
both parties to it have been pictured by 
Strindberg in his autobiographical novel, 
"A Fool's Confession," with a minute ex- 
actness and a psychological penetration that 
have probably never been surpassed. Some 
of the charges and insinuations contained in 



30 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

that remarkable book may be exaggerated, 
or even imagined, but to one knowing the 
man, his uncanny faculty for observation, 
and his irresistible tendency to record the 
truth in spite of himself, the conclusion seems 
inevitable that, on the whole, the picture of 
marital life presented in the book is correct. 
Where Strindberg made his mistake was in 
letting himself be tempted by his just griev- 
ances into mistaking the specimen for the 
species, the individual for the type. When 
he thought himself arraigning woman, his 
charges were in reality directed against a 
woman — his wife. And his later pictures 
of married life showed this form of human 
relationship not as it must be and always 
is, but as it may be and often becomes. 
Personally I believe that he never wrote a 
line that did not contain something of truth 
in it. But I believe also that frequently — 
and especially during the period in question 
— he mistook a truth for the truth. 

While the final catastrophe was still im- 
pending, he wrote some of his most wonder- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 31 

ful dramatic works — the three-act modern 
tragedy named "The Father," and his first 
group of iconoclastic one-act plays, with 
"Miss Julia" and "Creditors" preceding and 
surpassing all the rest. During a stay at 
Berlin, while he was still striving to recover 
from the shock imparted to his whole system 
by the divorce from his first wife, he met 
and courted a sympathetic German woman, 
a writer also, whose tastes seemed congenial 
to his own. This second experiment lasted 
only a few years. It was not so violently 
unhappy as the first one, but the experiences 
it implied helped undoubtedly to bring on 
the crisis which finally overtook Strindberg 
at the age of forty-five — an age that almost 
always plays a significant part in the lives 
of greatly gifted men — and which served to 
wipe several years out of his existence as 
an artistic creator. 

At all times, from his earliest youth to 
the day of his death, he was keenly inter- 
ested in every aspect of life not only as an 
artist but as a thinker. He studied every 



32 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

branch of modern science from astronomy 
to sociology. Nature was to him always a 
book which he read with never-failing fas- 
cination. The comments of other men on 
that book were also of interest to him, but 
at no time was he inclined to accept them 
unchallenged. Some day the world will 
know what a treasure trove of suggestive 
ideas lies hidden among Strindberg's scien- 
tific and philosophical speculations, even 
when these appear most fantastic. Not that 
I believe him always to have been in the 
right, but I think that, in his criticism of 
modern science, however uncharitable it be 
in form, he was always on the track of some 
truth still hidden from the patient plodders 
in the field involved. 

From an early period, when a physician's 
calling was in his mind and actually led him 
into the dissecting room and the laboratory, 
he entertained a passionate fondness for 
chemistry and its problems. During the 
time of which I am now speaking those 
problems engrossed his mind completely. 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 33 

The will-o'-the-wisp pursued most ardently 
was the transmutability of elements hitherto 
supposed to be stable and irreducible. Back 
of that dream lay the older one of making 
gold, and it was with this that Strindberg's 
overwrought fancy became more and more 
preoccupied. But not for the sake of gain. 
What he sought, then as always, was truth 
— and it is as a seeker after truth, after 
spiritual treasures, that Strindberg should 
be fixed in our minds. 

His strange search at Paris in the middle 
nineties brought him what he looked for, 
but not exactly in the form that he had ex- 
pected. For he found not ordinary gold 
but — the mystic faith of Swedenborg. 
Through this faith he won his way once 
more to health and strength and spiritual 
balance and creative power. But ere he 
reached that far, he nearly sacrificed both 
life and reason. There is another auto- 
biographical work, "Inferno," in which he 
told of his travels through the nethermost 
regions of despair and delusion. In all the 



34 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

world's literature there is not another book 
quite its equal. It is a document that must 
enter as one of the foundation stones of our 
coming' understanding of the human mind. 

Returning to Sweden in the summer of 
1896. Strindberg actually spent a couple of 
months in a private sanitarium kept by an 
old friend. A year later he began to write 
again — first of all the volumes embodying 
the mental crisis just completed. And then, 
while all the world was still thinking him 
lost for ever, there ensued a period of such 
miraculously creative activity that soon its 
results eclipsed all his earlier achievements. 
Plays, modern and historical, realistic and 
symbolistic; novels and stories: pamphlets 
of critical, scientific and political bearing; 
verse and prose ; works of playful fancy and 
others filled with the deepest pathos — a 
whole literature in short, with all its atten- 
dant subdivisions, seemed to pour forth in 
unbroken stream from his fertile brain. 

Of his private life during the final period 
it is hardly necessary to speak. Even when 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 35 

his fame rose into higher and higher flood 
tide, there came days of disappointment and 
sorrow. Too often his efforts — even the best 
— were met with a lack of understanding, 
or a premeditated misconstruction, that 
tempted the berserker nature within him 
into outbursts like those contained in cer- 
tain chapters of his last novel, "Black 
Flags," or in the pamphlet entitled 
"Speeches to the Swedish Nation." But in 
the main the tenor of his existence had be- 
come determined, and what happened for 
good or bad might disturb but not alter his 
general trend. There was a third marriage 
— a final search for the dreamed ideal. It 
was the briefest and least turbulent of his 
marital episodes. Then the solitude closed 
in around him again — the solitude in the 
midst of a multitude which he pictured so 
touchingly in "Alone." It was no longer 
quite unwelcome. He might have been un- 
reservedly happy but for one lack — that of 
children, his children. Not that he ever lost 
track of any one of them — there being five 



86 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

in all sprung from the three marriages — 
but he wanted them always around him. 

Toward those children, even more than 
toward their mothers, his heart went out in 
periods of estrangement and impending 
separation. To surrender them brought 
him deeper pain than any other loss. And 
yet he never tried to keep them wholly to 
himself, because he felt so strongly that 
children belong primarily to the mother for 
their own sake. It was fear of the mother's 
unworthiness as mother that raised his anger 
to a greater degree of fierceness than any- 
thing else. For though he had never re- 
ceived from his own mother the fullness of 
love he craved, he showed for his offspring 
a tenderness and a devotion such as com- 
monly the mother alone is held capable of. 
He might truly be named the poet of father- 
hood — and it must be held thoroughly char- 
acteristic that he named his most poignant 
tragedy "The Father," and not "The Hus- 
band." 

It is frequently asserted nowadays, that 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 37 

the father's love for the child is more or 
less acquired, more or less reasoned, while 
that of the mother is instinctive and spon- 
taneous. Against this view Strindberg car- 
ried on incessant warfare. In his eye the 
child appeared as strongly and as inevitably 
tied to one parent as to the other. And 
beneath this tie he saw the individual's crav- 
ing for continued existence in the child. 
One of the main issues in that duel of the 
sexes which forms such a conspicuous theme 
of his art is the struggle of each parent to 
impress his or her nature on the child, to 
the exclusion of the other one's. What his 
work might have been, if fate had granted 
him undisturbed enjoyment of that triple 
happiness which he repeatedly pictured in 
such glowing colors — the happiness of home 
and wife and children — no amount of spec- 
ulation can reveal. 

In January, 1912, all Sweden and much 
of Europe celebrated Strindberg's sixty- 
third birthday anniversary — his arrival at 



38 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

that "great climacteric' ' which, like the 
ancient Greeks, he regarded as the gateway 
to old age. He was far from well at the 
time and took no part in the festivities ar- 
ranged in his honor except by appearing for 
a few minutes at his window while a pro- 
cession of workmen filed past with their 
banners and torchlights. 

Not long afterwards the reports about 
his condition became more serious, and at 
last it was found that he had long been suf- 
fering from cancer of the stomach. Though 
in great pain much of the time, he remained 
to the last faithful to his Horatian motto: 
Speravit infestis — which may be translated 
as "hopeful in adversity." 

His death occurred on May 14, 1912. On 
the day before the last he called for his 
Bible, which he always kept within easy 
reach. Placing his hand on it, he said 
quietly: "Everything personal is now wiped 
out. I have settled with life. My balance 
has been struck. This book alone is right." 
A few moments later he added: "Now I 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 39 

have spoken my last words; now I'll say no 
more." And from that moment until the 
end came, he lay so still and silent that the 
children gathered about his bed could not 
tell whether he was conscious or not. 

As we see the real man Strindberg, with 
his life cleared of foolish legends and hostile 
interpretations, he was neither an ogre nor 
a sphinx, but, on the whole, a very simple 
human being. Simple he was always in his 
tastes, simple and direct in his likes and dis- 
likes, in his violent hatreds and strong affec- 
tions. Above all else he worshipped the 
three things which never appealed to Ibsen : 
music, flowers and children. 

At heart he was, I think, an incurable 
sentimentalist — and like all true sentimen- 
talists he was, on the surface, all contradic- 
tion, all conflict, all vain struggle to reach a 
point of equilibrium where the million para- 
doxes of life should become resolved into a 
single absolute truth. His reason was 
clearer and more comprehensive than that 
of most men; yet it was insufficient for the 



40 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

adequate control of the emotional pressure 
from within. His reason furnished a chan- 
nel for his every expression. It was the 
main outlet of all his activity as man and 
artist. Where another man might have 
been stirred into murder, he was moved into 
merciless analysis of his own and other peo- 
ple's soul states. But his motives were al- 
ways rooted below his head, so to speak. In 
this fact lies probably the explanation why 
he became an artist rather than a philoso- 
pher, and why he showed such lack of re- 
straint in his attacks on men and things that 
would not square with the demands of his 
own spirit. 

To sum him up in the fewest possible 
number of words, I wish once more to quote 
Anatole France, who wrote of Benjamin 
Constant what might as well have been writ- 
ten of Strindberg: "We may judge this 
man severely, but there is one greatness we 
cannot deny him : he was very unhappy, and 
that is not the lot of a mean soul." 



II 

HIS WORK 

TURNING from the man to what he 
achieved, we meet first of all with evi- 
dence of a startling and almost limitless 
manysidedness. Since the days of Goethe 
the world has not known a creative mind so 
catholic in its interests, or a pen so adapta- 
ble to every literary form. He touched 
every field of human thought — astronomy, 
mineralogy, chemistry, botany, zoology, 
biology, psychology, sociology, economy, his- 
tory, philology, philosophy, ethics, esthetics 
— and rarely without notable results. To 
the field more particularly his own he con- 
tributed with almost equal success as poet, 
novelist, essayist and playwright. 

Nor was his passion to embrace all life 
within a single consciousness restricted to 
a single mode of expression — by means of 
41 



42 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the written word. I have already mentioned 
his noteworthy excursions into painting, 
twice revealed to his astonished countrymen 
by interesting exhibitions (and by the fact 
that in the little Parisian cremerie which has 
been reproduced with photographic exact- 
ness in "There Are Crimes and Crimes," 
his paintings were much treasured but his 
writings wholly unknown). He was also 
a musician of fine discernment, and some 
of the music that figures so largely in 
his plays was arranged, or even composed, 
by himself. And during the final years 
of his life, while staking all he had on 
a theatrical experiment for the exclusive 
production of his own plays, he showed him- 
self a stage director of great ability and 
daring ingenuity. 

As a writer he impresses us not only by 
the variety but also by the amount of his 
production. The definite Swedish edition 
of his collected works will contain from fifty 
to sixty volumes — or something like six mil- 
lion words. If somebody tried to read them 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 43 

aloud, giving to the task eight hours a day, 
it would take him more than two years to 
finish those volumes. But even such figures 
as these fail to bring home the full extent 
of his achievement. A classified summary 
of his works, some of which are only now 
being published for the first time, will go 
farther in this direction. This is what such 
a list has to offer us: 

Fifty-six plays, varying in length from 
a single scene like "The Stronger" to the 
mighty trilogy named "Toward Damascus ;" 
nineteen volumes of novels and stories; 
eleven volumes of autobiographical fiction; 
three volumes of verse; sixteen volumes of 
historical and scientific writings; seventeen 
collections of essays, criticism, notes, etc. 

Much supercilious and some warranted 
criticism has been evoked by his ventures 
outside his own domain as a poet in the 
wider meaning of the term: as a writer of 
creative, imaginative literature. Final judg- 
ment must lie with the future, of course, and 
the audacity of all his thinking, whether em- 



U VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

bodied in artistic or non-artistic form, will 
tend still further to make that future a dis- 
tant one. For the present this much may 
be safely asserted : that his mind never dealt 
with any line of human knowledge without 
uncovering new and startling vistas. 

As a historian he compelled imitation 
even where he failed to win approval. His 
greatest work of this kind, "The Swedish 
People in War and Peace," was, in spite of 
admitted shortcomings, distinctly path- 
breaking both in character and effect. To- 
day this work is, next to the Bible, the one 
most read among the Swedes in the United 
States. As a keen-eyed and tenderly sym- 
pathetic observer of nature and of all life 
subordinate to that of man, he has not often 
been excelled. His more pretentious efforts 
at scientific thinking and writing were un- 
doubtedly marred by the venturesomeness 
of a mind accustomed to rely equally on in- 
tuition and on intellect for its conclusions. 
But even here some of his more daring sug- 
gestions have already been overtaken by the 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 45 

more slowly advancing forces of organized 
knowledge. Thus, to mention only one in- 
stance, the charming little essay called "The 
Intellect of Animals and Plants" may have 
seemed purely fantastic at the time of its 
publication in 1888. To-day it stands recog- 
nized as a definite herald of ideas since then 
scientifically formulated by men like Sir 
Francis Darwin. And at the same time one 
may well ask whether it did not furnish 
Maeterlinck with suggestions for his "The 
Intelligence of the Flowers," which it closely 
foreshadows. 

Regarding Strindberg primarily as an 
imaginatively creative writer, we find his 
career as such falling into three sharply de- 
fined periods. The first of these lasted from 
1868 to 1885 ; the second, from 1886 to 1894 ; 
the third, from 1897 to his death. Between 
the second and the third periods occurred 
that interregnum of absolute unproductivity, 
of which I have already spoken and to which 
I shall again refer. 



46 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

For purposes of convenience, rather than 
with any claim at positive definition, those 
periods may be designated as: 1) the ro- 
mantic ; 2 ) the naturalistic ; 3 ) the symbolis- 
tic. Of course, a tendency to naturalistic 
presentation of external facts characterized 
his work almost from the start, and it con- 
tinued to assert itself even in the most mysti- 
cal products of his final period. He was 
always a realist in the finest sense of that 
term — one insisting that art must cling 
closely to life as actually lived and stand 
firmly on this ground even when reaching 
most daringly into still unconquered realms 
of being. But on the other hand, there was 
always a touch of mysticism, of yearning 
idealism, of instinctive out-reaching for the 
life still to come, even in such characteristic 
works of the middle period as "The Father" 
and "Creditors." It represented a strain 
of feeling and thought nearly inseparable 
from the Scandinavian temperament. 

Of the first period, beginning with his 
initial gropings in the world of poetry, and 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 47 

coming to an end, in 1885, with the comple- 
tion of the four short stories published col- 
lectively as "Real Utopias," I have dared 
to speak as romantic chiefly because senti- 
ment still holds almost equal sway with logic 
in the work belonging to it. Strindberg 
has generally been described as a pupil of 
Zola. As a fact, he was not familiar with 
the work of the great French novelist when 
he established his own style and outlook in 
"The Red Room." As a boy and young 
man, he read whatever the world-literature 
had to offer him of lasting value. Goethe, 
Schiller and the Dane Oehlenschlager were 
among his earliest ideals. A little later he 
studied Dante and Shakespeare— in their 
native tongues — and against both he re- 
acted rather unsympathetically. The main 
reason was that he found them established 
as idols which one had to worship at the 
penalty of being declared lacking in taste 
and knowledge. He said in one of his auto- 
biographical novels that, as he had found 
it much less dangerous to attack Christ than 



48 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Shakespeare, he had chosen the latter to 
prove his critical fearlessness. Toward the 
end of his life he published a series of com- 
ments on the principal Shakespeare dramas 
which proved him at once a discriminating 
student and an ardent lover of England's 
Bard. 

But his chief artistic forbears were Hugo, 
Dickens, the brothers de Goncourt, and 
Mark Twain. To the Englishman and the 
two Frenchmen he confessed his indebted- 
ness repeatedly, and he maintained with his 
usual strenuousness that Dickens must be 
counted among those who had done most to 
bring modern poetry back to real life. The 
influence exercised on him by the great 
American humorist remained long unrecog- 
nized, but of late it has been pointed out by 
several Swedish critics. And it is also re- 
called that one of his first literary efforts 
took the form of a series of translations in- 
cluding some of Mark Twain's most char- 
acteristic work. The stimulus which his 
ever susceptible fancy received from still 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 49 

another American writer did not become re- 
vealed until a few months after his death. 
Then the Swedish poet and novelist Ola 
Hansson published a number of letters di- 
vulging the fact that Strindberg had been 
eagerly reading some of Edgar Allan Poe's 
tales just before he produced such plays as 
"Creditors," "Pariah," and "Simoom," and 
the novels "Chandalah" and "At the Edge 
of the Sea." Of the inspiration which, at 
a much later time, he drew from Maeter- 
linck and other mystical writers, I shall 
speak further on. 

The transition from the first to the second 
period caused no interruption in his creative 
activity. Evidence that some kind of bor- 
der line was crossed about 1885 must be 
drawn from within the works then produced. 
But the moment we compare the preface of 
the first part of "Marriage," dating from 
1884, with that of the second part, written 
in 1886, we perceive that something of mo- 
ment must have happened in the meantime. 
Of course, the real events took place in 



50 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Strindberg's own mind. But the principal 
external facts connected with those inner 
changes were the confiscation of the first 
part of "Marriage" and the beginnings of 
his marital unhappiness. 

We know now, through the recently- 
published reminiscences of an unbiased 
and clear-eyed friend (Helene Welinder: 
Strindberg in Switzerland: Ord och Bild, 
Stockholm, September, 1912), that when, 
during the summer of 1884, Strindberg and 
Siri von Essen celebrated their seventh wed- 
ding anniversary, they were still conscious 
of a deep happiness in their common life. 
And we know also from the same source 
that shortly afterwards the wife's growing 
impatience with a merely domestic career 
began to break into open flame, while the 
husband seemed to regard the very idea of 
her reappearance on the stage with a scorn 
and a disgust that he had not evidenced dur- 
ing the first years of their marriage. It 
was this growing tension between two op- 
posed wills that nursed the subsequent es- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 51 

trangement of their spirits, until a burning 
love turned into burning hatred. 

His altered attitude toward womanhood 
is the first thing that makes itself felt in the 
second of the two prefaces already referred 
to. But back of it we suspect the presence 
of changes reaching much farther down into 
the writer's conception of life. The man 
who wrote the first part of "Marriage" and 
"Real Utopias" was, on the whole, well con- 
tent w T ith his world. The author of the 
second part of "Marriage" and of "The 
Father" strikes us, on the other hand, as 
a man doubting the very possibility of hap- 
piness as a human state. 

I deem it highly regrettable that for many 
years hardly any works by Strindberg ex- 
cept those dating from his middle period 
became known in the English-speaking 
countries. For in many respects I cannot 
but think that period abnormal — represent- 
ing a deviation from his true line of develop- 
ment. During those years between 1885 
and 1894, the nature of Strindberg, which 



52 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

was no whit less capable of love and faith 
than of hatred and doubt, became sadly- 
warped. All the world lay wrapt in grey 
mist. Woman, once angelic, turned into a 
devil incarnate. Life was seen as war to the 
hilt — and love was the worst form this war 
could assume. 

To me it seems quite logical that this 
period, and no other, should see Strindberg 
turn from his former social outlook to a 
temporary acceptance of Nietzsche's ultra- 
individualistic superman theories. It is the 
works from this period that have brought 
him the name of a misogynist and the repu- 
tation of being too grim and gloomy for 
races which are essentially wholesome and 
optimistic in their tendencies. Yet the same 
period gave the world a series of exquisite 
pictures from life among the peasant-fisher- 
men on those islands between Stockholm and 
"the edge of the sea" where Strindberg had 
previously sought and won the inspiration 
for his "Master Olof." 

Then came the long pause already men- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 53 

tioned. All artistic production was stopped. 
Scientific speculation took its place, follow- 
ing more and more erratic channels, until 
it ended in a spell of religious brooding of 
distinctly morbid type. It was at this time 
rumor made a Catholic of him. "Lutheran- 
ism has been seized by such a panic that 
Catholics are seen everywhere," Strindberg 
wrote ten years later in explanation of that 
rumor. The truth of it was that, guided by 
Balzac, Swedenborg, Maeterlinck, and the 
French mystic writer signing himself "Sar" 
Peladan, he turned from the materialistic 
creed which had failed to serve his soul as 
a sheet anchor in the hour of supreme up- 
heaval. When the crisis was over, he stood 
forth not as a confessor of this or that creed, 
but as a member of the mystic brotherhood 
whose mission it is to remind man of the 
omnipresence of the unknowable. A pessi- 
mist he remained even after the dawn 
of his new faith had set his soul singing 
once more, but sadness and resignation 
took the place of bitterness and defi- 



54 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ance as the fundamental notes of his soul's 
melody. 

Some of the works included in the ap- 
pended chronological list stand out beyond 
the rest either as epoch-making in the 
author's own career, or as marking a dis- 
tinct advance on the part of the human 
spirit in its long struggle to substitute con- 
scious for unconscious growth — and of these 
alone I shall be able to speak here. 

The play "Master Olof" was at first 
named "The Renegade,' , and under this title 
I hope it will become known to the English- 
speaking world. To Strindberg himself it 
was largely what "The Pretenders" was to 
Ibsen — at once a questioning and a formula- 
tion of his own genius. The greater mod- 
ernity of the Swedish work is shown by the 
fact that its principal hero, who is one of 
three central figures, fails equally to reach 
a triumph like that of King Hdkon, the man 
divinely commissioned, and to suffer a dis- 
aster like that of the self-doubting Earl 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 55 

Skule. Instead he lives on to complete his 
work — in compromise. To win his way, or 
rather a way for his mission, he has to sacri- 
fice a part of his vision — and so he is de- 
nounced as a renegade by him who sees too 
far ahead and will sacrifice nothing. This 
is life, of course; and thus Strindberg may 
be said to have, for all time, given the true 
sj^mbolization of the everlasting struggle be- 
tween the genius and the mass on one side, 
and between true and false genius on the 
other. 

"The Red Room" is a satirical novel, em- 
bodying the conflict between bohemianism 
and philistinism at Stockholm in the seven- 
ties, and written in a vein that shows a rare 
combination of youthful vigor and merciless 
satire. But it gives also, as almost all of 
Strindberg's novels, a detailed study of so- 
cial conditions in Sweden at that time. 
Hardly a phase of national existence is 
unrepresented, and each one of them is 
sketched in such manner that we also get an 
idea of the directional tendencies expressed 



56 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

through it. Strindberg's faculty for draw- 
ing lifelike pictures not only of individuals 
but of vast social groups and organisms is 
among the most striking of his gifts. And 
to the future historian his novels and auto- 
biographical writings should prove exceed- 
ingly valuable. 

In the three volumes of short stories 
named "Swedish Events and Adventures," 
he made the past of his country a reality 
no less vital than the one confronting us 
to-day. The genre was by no means new, 
but none before Strindberg had raised it 
to quite such perfection. After him similar 
effects have been achieved with even greater 
success by Anatole France among others. 

The first part of "Marriage" contains a 
dozen specimens of modern marital unions, 
presented in a far from unfriendly light. 
In the preface Strindberg laid out a pro- 
gramme concerning woman's position which 
vies in radicalism with that for which the 
women themselves are now fighting all 
over the world. Not only would he grant 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 57 

them the suffrage, but he insisted that nor- 
mal social growth necessitated their having 
it. But in the second volume of stories is- 
sued under the same title, he made a frank 
attack on two principles generally accepted 
as essential to woman's complete emancipa- 
tion, namely the right to hold property, and 
the right to work at anything for which they 
can qualify themselves. If their tendency 
be disregarded, the stories in both volumes 
will be found to possess high artistic 
value. 

"The Father" was Strindberg's supreme 
effort to symbolize the life and death strug- 
gle between man and woman for such im- 
mortality as may be offered them by the 
child. The picture of that struggle is splen- 
did but unfair. Man, as man, is given ra- 
tional insight, while to woman is granted 
little more than low cunning. And as con- 
science is allied with reason, the victory falls 
to its unconscionable opponent. It may 
seem paradoxical to express a regret that 
the sex problem should enter at all into this 



58 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

play — a play designed wholly to exhaust 
that very problem. But there is a psycho- 
logical side to the work that has nothing 
whatever to do with sex, and this side would 
hold our interest just as firmly if the con- 
flict were raging between two men. The 
corrosive power of suggestion is here shown 
with diabolical skill. It is a duel of souls, 
with words for weapons, and by a seed of 
doubt sown in the right way at the right 
moment, one of those souls is shattered and 
scattered as fatally as a warship when its 
magazine explodes. 

"Miss Julia," perhaps the most widely 
known of Strindberg's works, was a frank 
experiment in new form. Not only are the 
stage arrangements unconventional, but in- 
termissions have been dispensed with. Nat- 
uralism never came nearer to a conquest of 
the stage, and some of the innovations em- 
bodied in this drama are likely to form part 
of our future dramatic tradition. Again the 
plot seems to offer us nothing but a sex duel, 
with the man for winner. But back of Miss 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 59 

Julia and her valet-lover stand two contend- 
ing strata of humanity — the so-called upper 
and lower classes. What Strindberg shows 
us is how a continued process of selective 
breeding may lead to over-refinement and 
a weakening of the vital instincts. The 
racial strain which has reached such a point 
can find salvation only in mixture with some 
strain less far removed from the general 
source of life. If class prejudices or other 
inhibitive tendencies prevent such a mixture, 
then the weakened strain will be sloughed 
off by the race, so that place will be made 
for other strains with unimpaired vitality 
and still dormant powers of refinement. 

With the novel named "At the Edge of 
the Sea," Strindberg tried to place himself 
unreservedly on Nietzschean ground by pic- 
turing a superman of to-day and the fate 
such a man would be likely to suffer at the 
hands of ordinary humanity. In the course 
of this attempt, he gave a summary of man's 
mental development from primal days to 
the present moment that I count among the 



60 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

most significant and most brilliant pieces of 
writing contained in modern literature. The 
principal importance of this novel, however, 
lies in the fact that Strindberg's merciless 
logic automatically demolished the glamor 
of the Nietzschean dream creature. And 
so this Swedish superman wins in the end 
nothing but a splendid grave. And his 
doom is pronounced not by the hostile cun- 
ning of the mass, but by his own vain pre- 
sumption. He fails just as every one 
must fail who sets out to make others good 
without their own cooperation. Read in the 
right way, this novel teaches that superman- 
hood must be founded on a good deal more 
of genuine humility than ordinary manhood 
ever contains. 

It was during that middle period of em- 
bittered defiance that Strindberg first con- 
ceived the idea of a series of autobiographi- 
cal novels, in which he would adhere closely 
to his own actual experience while the shock 
of such self-revelation was to be softened 
by a change of all proper names. The first 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 61 

volume of this series, issued in 1886 under 
the title of "The Bondwoman's Son," gives 
a picture of child life that is full of startling 
revelations and exquisite interpretations. 
Strindberg himself has said somewhere that 
all fiction must be autobiographical in order 
to obtain full documentary validity. Even 
if we hold this assertion too sweeping, we 
must at least grant him to have proved that 
the most intimate personal experience may 
be turned into legitimate fiction. 

While at all times, to use his own ex- 
pression, Strindberg "had three strings to 
his lyre," he appeared during the third 
period primarily as a dramatist, and it was 
as such that he preferred to be considered. 
There is hardly one play from his final 
period that would not warrant special notice 
on 'some account or another. In the eyes 
of his countrymen, his dramatic presenta- 
tions of Swedish history have tended to take 
precedence. And on their account some 
have dared to call him the Shakespeare of 
Sweden. But the historical plays of Strind- 



62 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

berg are widely different in mettle from that 
displayed in the "histories" of Shakespeare. 
No matter how much we find to admire in 
the latter, they must be held melodramatic 
in form and rhetorical in expression. They 
are, in a word, artificial in their portrayal of 
the past. What Strindberg strove to do — 
and succeeded in doing, I think — was to 
reconstruct the everyday aspect of by-gone 
days. In order to bring the true inwardness 
as well as lifelike appearance of those days 
within the ken of our own, he put on the 
stage not imagined creatures of supernatural 
size, but plain-speaking men and women of 
our own kind. But back of these men and 
women we catch lurid glimpses of big social 
forces at work. In other words, his works 
are symbolical in the very best sense of this 
much misused term — symbolical in the same 
manner as man's own thinking — and for 
that reason I believe the day must come 
when even dramas so intensely national in 
their subject and spirit as "Gustavus Vasa," 
"Gustavus Adolphus" and "Charles XII" 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 63 

will be played and heard in the English- 
speaking countries. 

But for the present his main dramatic 
contributions to universal literature during 
this final period must be sought among the 
plays of modern life, and particularly among 
those that derived from a frankly acknowl- 
edged Maeterlinckian impetus. It was the 
early Maeterlinck of the puppet plays that 
set Strindberg once more seeking for a new 
form. The immediate result of this search 
was the fairy play "Swanwhite," a very 
charming but not convincingly original pro- 
duction. Had he stopped there, the charge 
of imitation sometimes heard might have 
had some warrant. But to speak of the 
author of "The Dream Play" or "Toward 
Damascus" as the imitator of anybody be- 
comes palpably ridiculous the moment you 
read these works. In both — but especially 
in the former — he strove to reproduce 
the kaleidoscopic flexibility and whimsi- 
cal logic of the dream. And in this 
way he succeeded as perhaps no one be- 



64 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

fore him to press all life into the narrow 
confines of a play. 

At one time he described "The Dream 
Play" as a "Buddhistic and proto-Christian 
drama." Thereby he indicated its under- 
lying philosophy of enlightened resignation 
and of almost Tolstoyan passivity in the 
face of violence and injustice and wrong. 
But we must not be misled by this effort of 
the matured poet to grasp and vitalize an 
ideal foreign to his own temperament. "I 
am a soldier," says The Hunter in "The 
Great Highway," speaking as the alter ego 
of the author; "I am always fighting — fight- 
ing to preserve my personal independence." 
To me the most potent element in "The 
Dream Play," the one most likely to ger- 
minate and survive not only as art but as 
philosophy, is its tolerant acceptance of 
every human aspect as an integral part of 
life. Its main shortcoming lies in a tend- 
ency to consider all such aspects as estab- 
lished for all future. Viewing life statically, 
however, and not kinetically — from the real- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 65 

ist's viewpoint rather than from the ideal- 
ist's — it will prove difficult to find an artistic 
symbolization of it more subtle or more con- 
vincing than that given us in "The Dream 
Play." 

Although the trilogy "Toward Damas- 
cus" is autobiographical in source as well as 
purpose — a sort of gigantic private reckon- 
ing worked out by one deeming himself too 
seriously tried by life — its appeal is never- 
theless universal. We may forget the fate 
of him who projected those mighty dramatic 
cloud-shapes, and read out of them nothing 
but a masterly record of the stumbling 
progress made by a human soul in its search 
for harmonious correlation of its own con- 
flicting elements — its desires and aspira- 
tions, its selfish and unselfish tendencies. In 
the third part we find Father Melchior call- 
ing out to the Strindbergian protagonist, 
here named The Stranger: "You began 
life by affirming everything; you continued 
it by denying everything. End it now with 
a coordination. Therefore, cease to be ex- 



66 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

elusive! Say not 'either — or,' but say in- 
stead 'both — and!' " Here we have Strind- 
berg's onward march through forty years 
of thinking and working outlined in a 
couple of sentences — and we cannot fail 
to recognize its identity with the gen- 
eral course of human progress, which runs 
from blind belief through arrogant denial 
to a reasoned balancing of faith and 
doubt. 

Close as the trilogy must have stood to 
what was Strindberg's innermost self, there 
is a professedly objective work that seems 
to have come still closer, though in a differ- 
ent manner — a work where Strindberg's 
artistic aloofness makes us almost forget 
that, in spite of it, he was still dealing with 
his own spiritual experiences, and with 
nothing else. This work, the double play 
named "The Dance of Death," I am often 
inclined to count the crowning climax of 
his production, the work in which his always 
remarkable art reached its highest potency 
of perfection. It is as closely knit as a 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 67 

Greek drama or a play by Ibsen at his best. 
Only three characters figure in the first part, 
and five in the second. There are only two 
settings — one for each part. The dialogue 
has rarely, if ever, been surpassed for com- 
bined incisiveness and verisimilitude. Inci- 
dent leads to incident with a fatality that 
vainly tries to mask its logic behind the 
leering face of chance. Some of the scenes 
are among the most tensely dramatic that 
may be found in modern literature, and yet 
the total impression is just what the author 
seems to have aimed at : a sense of the hope- 
less monotony underlying life's superficial 
disturbances. 

A piece of most delicate, and yet most 
deep-reaching symbolism (outwardly ex- 
pressed by the round form of the room in 
which the action takes place) lies in the cir- 
cular movement of the first part, whereby 
everything becomes reduced once more to 
the state of the opening scene. All the 
tumult of living is brought back to a pitiful 
striving at self-assertion on the part of the 



68 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

individual. Yet the suggestion is always 
present, that in all his seemingly futile striv- 
ing the individual takes the place of a pup- 
pet in the hands of some higher power, work- 
ing for great aims that he cannot perceive. 
Life and hell are rendered almost synonym- 
ous, but the Swedenborgian idea of hell as 
a state of mind is not for a moment left out 
of sight. The one possible agent of escape 
is the Hogarthian fiddler, always hovering 
on the horizon like a storm cloud before 
which all cower in panic. But when he 
comes at last and brings the dance to a 
close, he is seen to bring with him pardon 
and peace, mercy and harmony. One of 
the figures in the play, Curt, might be called 
the superman of Strindberg's final period: 
a touching incarnation of the struggle be- 
tween reasoned humility and instinctive 
pride that was always raging in the author's 
own breast. But the most striking figure 
of all is that of The Captain, the embodi- 
ment of ruthless self-concern, to whom 
nevertheless is given the pronouncement of 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 69 

Strindberg's ultimate philosophical creed: 
"Wipe out and pass on!" 

Few works produced by Strindberg 
brought him harsher criticism in his native 
country than the two novels "The Gothic 
Rooms" and "Black Flags," which served 
him as vent pipes for a gathering wrath. 
During the last decade of his life the re- 
lationship between himself and certain con- 
temporary writers approaching close to him 
in rank was always more or less strained, 
until, a few years before his death, it led to 
an outburst of bitter polemics known in 
Swedish literary history as the "Strindberg 
feud." To some extent the fault was his 
own. Largely, however, it lay with his 
rivals, who all too often let personal preju- 
dice and jealousy dictate judgments that 
should have been concerned with nothing 
but actual merit. Whether it be ever wise 
for the injured in such cases to protest in 
person is a question not easy to decide. And 
in making his protests, Strindberg fre- 
quently shot over the mark, or even went 



70 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

so far as to make capital out of the private 
lives of his supposed or real enemies. But 
with every allowance made for the doubtful 
aspects of the two works mentioned above, 
there remains in them a residuum of merit 
and of broad appeal that will probably in- 
sure them approval from a time that shall 
have forgotten the personal accusations now 
read between their lines. Even at his worst, 
Strindberg was one of the great. And 
though he might be cruelly unjust to rivals 
or enemies, he rarely failed in his exact ob- 
servation of the generation to which he be- 
longed. If that generation was sick of soul 
or loose of living, the blame can hardly be 
laid on the man who merely discovered and 
proclaimed the sickness and the sin. 

Of "Inferno," his most original effort at 
autobiographical fiction, I have already 
spoken. In 1903 he wrote another volume 
in the same series, "Alone," which might 
be called the antithesis of his previous 
record of wandering through a self-made 
hell. It is a piece of pure poetry — the 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 71 

autumnal reverie of a man who, at last, has 
made his peace with the world and paid the 
price for it. And in this volume Strind- 
berg's marvellous power of word-painting 
stands revealed in all its glory. 

I cannot end this all too brief characteriza- 
tion of Strindberg's main works without 
calling attention to an additional and some- 
what confusing aspect of his passion for 
self-revelation. Not satisfied with giving 
us a detailed story of his life and artistic de- 
velopment, he wrote also stories of the stoiy, 
revelations of how previous revelations had 
come to be made. In a number of pam- 
phlets, and particularly in those quaint col- 
lections of notes, sketches, aphorisms and 
speculations which he named "Blue Books," 
material of this kind was piled up at a tre- 
mendous rate, until the image to be evoked 
became blurred by the superabundance of 
fact used to evoke it. I wonder, however, 
whether this condition may not alter as pass- 
ing time places everything in proper per- 
spective. For it would seem that concern- 



72 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ing a mind so rich and so original, both in 
its coloring and in its tendencies, the amount 
of available data could hardly become too 
great. 

The influence exercised by Strindberg on 
the literature of his native country was tre- 
mendous — the very language of Sweden 
seemed to take on new color and vigor 
through his audacious use of its more col- 
loquial elements. Until he appeared Sweden 
could hardly be said to have a literature of 
international appeal. With his appearance 
began a new era of startling fertility and 
variety. For the first time the country 
possessed a native drama of genuine merit, 
and to the novel an impetus was given which 
is still making itself felt and of which the 
richest fruits may yet remain ungarnered. 
For a long time Strindberg was the sole 
model: all the others were mere epigoni. 
And even when a new movement, which 
might be called neo-romantic because of its 
mystical and lyrical undercurrents, devel- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 73 

oped from a hostile reaction against the ex- 
aggerated naturalism of some among his 
followers, Strindberg himself was among the 
first to prove himself a master of the new 
mood. Thus he remained a leader to the 
very end, though no longer the only one as 
he was in the beginning. 

But no matter how great a writer may 
appear to his immediate surroundings, or 
how valuable his services may be to the 
literature of his own country, something 
more is wanted to insure him a place in that 
larger field where community of blood and 
tongue is no longer a consideration. Almost 
from the start of his career as writer, how- 
ever, Strindberg displayed qualities capable 
of carrying his name and fame beyond the 
borders of his native land. Norway and 
Denmark were, naturally enough, the first 
foreign countries to acclaim his rising star, 
but almost at the same time its rays were 
discovered in Germany. And in Germany 
Strindberg remains to this day recognized 
as one of the principal builders of the litera- 



74 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ture which is most characteristic of our 
own day. And there is good reason to 
believe that the naturalistic movement, 
which seems to have been an inevitable 
phase of the last century's literary devel- 
opment everywhere, reached Germany 
through Strindberg and the Dane Jacob- 
sen rather than through direct imitation of 
French models, the ground having been 
prepared for it by an eager study of 
Dickens. 

Of what Strindberg may have given, or 
failed to give, to the spirit of his age, I shall 
speak later. At present I am only con- 
cerned with his contributions to form. Re- 
garding his life-work in its entirety, his main 
contributions of this kind seem to have been : 
first, a breaking down of old conventions 
whereby both the novel and the drama, in 
their design as well as in their expression, 
were rendered more truly life-like; and, 
secondly, an intensification of the psycholog- 
ical analysis by application of scientific dis- 
coveries so recent that they are only just 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 75 

now becoming the property of the average 
thinking layman. 

It has been said that his characters do 
nothing but quarrel, that they are too busy 
abusing each other to really live. I might 
suggest a comparative study of a writer like 
Galsworthy, and I think such a study would 
reveal that even the gentle irony and won- 
derful balance of the man who gave us "The 
Country House" and "Fraternity" fail to 
keep the dignified, self-complacent charac- 
ters of "upper" England from spending 
much of their time and energy on the futile 
game of incrimination and recrimination. 
Here as elsewhere, I fear the fault is with 
life and not with Strindberg. His fault 
it was simply to picture us as we are rather 
than as we should like to be thought — and 
we are still a lot of self-centred, grasping, 
bad-tempered children. Of course, he did 
dwell on the unlovely sides of our characters 
and manners with rather morbid preoccupa- 
tion, but he did so because he thought us 
sick, dead, damned souls, whose one way to 



76 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

health and life and salvation lay through a 
road now being preached in this country as 
the one reliable panacea — namely publicity. 

Whether his figures quarrel or caress each 
other — as they sometimes will do, and then 
most convincingly — there is in their quick, 
brisk utterances a sound as of hammer- 
blows on an anvil. And about their actions 
and feelings, their thoughts and words, 
there is a circumspect directness, if I so may 
name it, that is otherwise to be found only 
in real life. Their talk may wander, their 
actions may be ever so disingenuous or 
hypocritical — about their motives there can 
rarely be any question, and what they say 
or do is sure to be what will best serve those 
motives. 

Now and then Strindberg would preach 
brazenly, and use his figures most merci- 
lessly for his private purposes, but even then 
they remain natural. Take, for instance, 
one of the long harangues delivered either 
by Gustav or Adolph in "Creditors." Is 
there one man among us so short of breath 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 77 

or firm of temper that he has never broken 
out into some such stream of fermenting 
and corrosive, or merely apologetic, phrases ? 
And even when, in the course of one such 
outburst, Adolph begins by saying that he 
has only been Teklas lover, but not her 
husband, and ends by exclaiming that, as he 
cannot be her lover, he is going to be her 
husband whether she likes it or not, this 
implies no mistake on the part of Adolplis 
creator, but a particularly shrewd reproduc- 
tion of the way our minds wander when 
lashed by certain emotional storm winds. 

I can think of few writers who have 
equalled Strindberg's acuteness in distin- 
guishing the subtlest nuances within the 
ever-shifting human soul. One of the rea- 
sons why he seems almost childish at times 
to some readers is just that he sees so clearly 
what usually lies hidden within the inner- 
most recesses of the soul, and that he de- 
scribes what he sees with such gruesome ac- 
curacy. Mental processes that in the aver- 
age man seem incapable of rising above the 



78 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

threshold of the subconscious, seemed within 
him to push boldly into the full light of self- 
consciousness, and what he tells us of them 
has the strange aspect of forms until then 
deemed wholly chimerical. The very idea 
that such things may exist within us is re- 
sented. 

What I have just said applies equally 
to the realms of head and heart, to our emo- 
tions and our thoughts. All human possi- 
bilities — even the most inhuman — lie dor- 
mant within every one of us; and now and 
then some of the worst among them will 
rear their poisonous fangs in a moment of 
lowered vitality or relaxed vigilance. Where 
Strindberg failed, perhaps, was not in his 
insistence on their presence, but in his doubt 
of our ability to push them back into the 
primeval darkness whence they have fol- 
lowed us like shadows — inalienable, and yet 
no longer true parts of our more human 
selves. 

To prove these contentions of mine would 
take more space than I can dispose of for 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 79 

the present. A random example must suf- 
fice — even though it be not as typical as 
I might wish. The behavior of Miss Julia 
has often been attacked as too unwomanly, 
or too pathological for legitimate poetical 
use. The nature of that behavior the reader 
must discover for himself in the play. All 
I want to point out here is that Strindberg 
undertook to picture a type which, while 
existing everywhere and having particular 
validity during the present transitory stage 
of the social organism, yet stands distinctly 
apart from the main mass of humanity. 
This type, developed by the over-breeding 
of some racial strain, constitutes a serious 
problem to-day. 

"Miss Julia" was written and published 
in 1888. The first edition of Sir Francis 
Galton's "Inquiries into Human Faculty" 
saw the light five years earlier, to be sure, 
but I don't think it made much of a public 
stir at first, and I am sure that it was quite 
unknown to Strindberg in 1888. In this 
work its author speaks of "the diminished 



80 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

fertility of highly-bred animals," and adds 
that in them "together with infertility is 
combined some degree of sexual indiffer- 
ence, or when passion is shown, it is not un- 
frequently for some specimen of a coarser 
type." In this single sentence, coming from 
one of the most painstaking students of our 
own age, is contained all the justification 
that can ever be required for the existence 
of Bliss Julia. 

Yet I do not for a moment mean to insist 
that Strindberg was always perfect, or even 
reasonably correct. He was too impetuous, 
too impassioned, too high-strung, not to 
stray from the truth at times. A far from 
hostile Swedish critic, Tor Hedberg, re- 
proached him once for his "blind faith in the 
value of even the most fleeting impulse." 
And he, of whose painstaking efforts at ex- 
actness I have already spoken, was some- 
times outright slovenly in his carelessness. 
His over-confidence in his own memory ac- 
counts for some of this shortcoming; his 
preoccupation with large outlines and sweep- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 81 

ing truths, for more ; his method of working 
and the circumstances under which he 
worked, for still more. 

From the first he was beset with economi- 
cal worries. At once generous and imprac- 
tical, he was unable to make money stay 
in his hands. Really enormous sums passed 
through those hands, and yet he was always 
in difficulty. And the demands on him were 
ever growing. As early as the first half of 
the eighties — the period of "Marriage" and 
"Real Utopias," of "The Secret of the 
Guild" and "The New Kingdom"— he was 
so hard pressed that he had to send out his 
manuscripts without even looking them 
over. His very consciousness of neglect 
bred an almost irresistible aversion to the 
reading of his own work until long after 
its production. 

Nor did he ponder or hesitate while pro- 
ducing it. Like one of the old vikings, he 
attacked rather than essayed his task. Re- 
turning from a brisk morning walk, he would 
strip to the waist and then write without 



82 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

pause for about four hours. Hardly ever 
would he turn back to erase or correct. 
Everything seemed to flow from some inner 
storehouse where it had been lying ready 
for external materialization. Considering 
this, what should be wondered at is not his 
occasional slips, but the marvellous accu- 
racy and agility of a mind that could in 
such fashion produce works like "The Dance 
of Death," where the dialogue is intricate 
in its texture as the famous web of Penelope, 
and yet inexorable as fate itself in its 
progress toward the predestined goal. 

So far the effect of Strindberg's influence 
outside of Sweden has shown itself most 
markedly on the stage. The drama as we 
have it to-day, in plays like those of Shaw, 
Galsworthy, Granville Barker and the late 
St. John Hankin, must be held the joint 
production of Ibsen and Strindberg. 
Others — men like Bjornson and Maeterlinck 
— have been among the master builders, but 
in almost every instance the determining im- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 8S 

'pulse to liberation and innovation came from 
one of the two spirits who, in spite of in- 
numerable differences, had so much in com- 
mon. One wrought with the quick, fiery 
leap of a hungry flame; the other, with the 
grinding deliberation of a glacier. The re- 
sult was the same in each case: new life, 
truer life, more intense life. Ibsen gave 
more to the spirit of the drama, Strindberg 
more to its form. It was the rather tragic 
destiny of the latter to create instruments 
of exquisite precision which he himself could 
not always use to best advantage. 

As early as 1872, when he was only 
twenty-three, he did in his "Master Olof" 
what, nearly twenty years later, Shaw did 
more pleasantly but no more convincingly 
in "Csesar and Cleopatra." When, in 1888, 
he wrote his famous preface to "Miss Julia," 
advocating naturalistic reforms for the 
stage, he was hopelessly in advance of his 
time. To-day those ideas have become so 
largely accepted in the best playhouses that 
to many people they seem like outlived com- 



84 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

monplaces when read for the first time in 
English. When those ideas were just be- 
ginning their triumphant conquest of the 
stage, Strindberg was already advocating 
new forms of still more daring realism — the 
suggestive, symbolical realism that has be- 
come most closely associated with the names 
of Gordon Craig and Georg Fuchs. 

We may be opposed to the spirit of much 
that he has written. Other artists will study 
and repeat his form, pouring into it the 
spirit which their own day demands — the 
spirit out of which the unborn soul of the 
future is to be shaped. Thus, and thus only, 
the torch is handed on from generation to 
generation. For to no man, however great, 
is it granted to give everything; and from 
no man have we the right to exact absolute 
perfection as the sole condition of our ap- 
proval. 



Ill 

His Spirit 

THE process of gradual displacement 
and substitution which we call prog- 
ress seems invariably to result from a con- 
flict between opposed but complementary 
principles. Of such antagonisms life holds 
any number. But out of the mass a few 
emerge as more vital and deep-going than 
the rest. In the spiritual life of man, as 
we find it embodied in his speculative and 
imaginative literatures, there are three pre- 
dominant antagonisms of this kind. As the 
human mind swings toward one side or the 
other across these lines of everlasting cleav- 
age, we obtain certain universal moods, or 
ways of looking at life, that we name re- 
spectively: 1) realism and idealism; 2) in- 
dividualism and socialism; 3) scepticism and 
mysticism. 

85 



86 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Realism insists that, in the last instance, 
art must always fall back on concrete ex- 
istence for its material. Idealism maintains 
that, after all, the highest purpose of art is 
to use the material thus obtained for the 
creation of new life. In other words, realism 
looks mainly to the present moment, and 
idealism to the future; realism to what is, 
idealism to what should be. 

Individualism emphasizes the cellular con- 
struction of all society, and the dependence 
of social welfare on the free development 
of each cell — that is, of the individual. 
Socialism prefers to accentuate the visible 
and invisible connections that bind all the 
cells together into a larger unit, and that 
render their individual welfare dependent 
on the harmonious development of the social 
organism in its entirety. 

Scepticism sees life as a concrete multi- 
plicity. It clings to the relativity of all be- 
ing and has for its aim to save man from 
spiritual stagnation by revealing to him the 
insufficiency of every truth already estab- 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 87 

lished. To mysticism, on the other hand, 
life appears and appeals primarily as an ab- 
stract unity, and it serves to save man from 
spiritual chaos by urging him to shape the 
fragments of shattered truths into new ones 
of nobler aspect and wider application. 

The character of this threefold array of 
distinctions makes it plain that we are not 
dealing with certain falsehoods to be over- 
come and certain truths to be established in 
their place. Realism and idealism, for in- 
stance, are equally true, which simply means 
that they are equally needful to the orderly 
workings of human reason, and also to the 
effective comprehension of the problem of 
living. They may be said to represent two 
juxtaposed viewpoints from which life may 
be observed. And in order to grasp life in 
its fullness, in all its protean complexity, 
man must endeavor to do the impossible — 
he must try to behold life and all it contains 
from both those antipodal points at the same 
time. Progress, or the mind's continued 
swinging back and forth between these 



88 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

points, cannot, therefore, have for its pur- 
pose any complete elimination of the prin- 
ciples involved, but must rather be looked 
upon as aiming at the gradual merging of 
the essential elements in each pair of op- 
posites into a synthetic whole. And it is 
only reasonable to conclude that the great- 
ness of men and periods alike may be 
measured by the extent to which they suc- 
ceed in such a synthetic embodiment of 
theretofore prevailing antagonisms. 

What we call genius implies most fre- 
quently, of course, a supremely satisfactory 
embodiment of the momentary swing of the 
racial mind toward one extreme or the other. 
Less frequently, but even more characteris- 
tically, it implies a foreshadowing of the im- 
pending reversal of the racial mind's mo- 
mentary bias. But rarest and greatest that 
form of genius must be held which mirrors 
in its expressions both what is and what will 
come, so that it implies not a one-sided de- 
velopment, but an organic fusion of some 
dualism that cuts all the rest of life in twain. 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 89 

Among the salient qualities in Strind- 
berg's character — inherited or developed by 
reaction against his environment — none 
seems to have been more determining for the 
spirit informing his work than that which 
he himself named his "sensitiveness to pres- 
sure." Implying, as it did, an over-concern 
about his own self, a fear that the world 
might violate and overwhelm what he held 
most typical of his selfhood, and becoming, 
as it also did, morbidly exaggerated in times 
of physical and psychical depression, it kept 
him throughout life in a state of internal 
and external conflict. 

It prevented him from ever feeling at 
peace either with the surrounding world or 
with his own purposes. It was the main 
cause of the tragedy which ran so unmistaka- 
bly through his whole life. It colored his 
relationship to every one with whom he came 
in contact, and especially to the women with 
whose assistance he sought to overcome his 
own fate. It kept him a stranger and an 
outcast within a generation whose innermost 



90 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

soul-secrets he laid bare in his work. It 
kept him, too, vainly seeking for happiness 
while the fretful voice within was whisper- 
ing all the time that happiness is unattain- 
able and should not be sought for. And 
strange as it may seem, when said of one 
so dogmatic in his utterances, it made it im- 
possible for him, even when he strove most 
pathetically, to surrender himself uncondi- 
tionally to any one current or attitude, the 
frequent result of any such effort being that 
he raised his voice still more clamorously to 
drown the nagging doubt within. 

This quality produced beyond doubt a 
greater degree of restlessness than was good 
for the normal development of his art. It 
served largely to create that atmosphere of 
disharmony and fruitless excitement which 
mars some of his best work. But it was 
also responsible for that wonderful alertness 
and agility of mind which the world was 
inclined to condemn as mere instability. It 
kept his spirit always "on the move," always 
searching for an abiding place of rest that 



AUGUST STRINDBEHG 91 

was never found, always ready to see "the 
other side" of any standpoint momentarily 
assumed. But just such a mind, so prone 
to find any accepted conviction empty and 
irksome, would be particularly fitted to be- 
come the typical incarnation of a century 
like the nineteenth, with its nervous striving 
after concreteness, its fear of being held the 
dupe of life, and its haunting dread that 
evolution and progress might in the end 
prove alien to each other. 

It is not to be wondered, then, that Strind- 
berg's art as a rule, though not always, em- 
bodied less of the fusion toward which life's 
integral antagonisms are eternally tending, 
than of the conflict, the violent swinging 
back and forth from one onesidedness to 
another, by which such a fusion is gradually 
to be attained. But as he threw himself 
with equal ardor now to this side and now 
to that, into sceptical realism or mystical 
idealism, he managed with marvellous ac- 
curacy to reflect or foreshadow a corre- 
sponding movement by the race-mind of the 



92 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

western world. Sometimes he followed; 
more often he led : but however startling his 
attitude might seem to the superficial glance 
of the unthinking, he was never out of touch 
with the prevailing spiritual trend of his 
day — except possibly at a single point: in 
his attitude toward women and their new 
aspirations toward a life more expressive 
of their own natures. The very abruptness 
of his transition from one viewpoint to an- 
other, as well as the arrogance with which 
he maintained the final validity of each new 
one, was characteristic of a time which, by 
its scientific and philosophical conquests, 
had been rendered incapable of remaining 
satisfied for long with any position repre- 
senting only a single aspect of the many- 
sided truth at the centre of things. 

Of the antipodal points defined above, 
there was not one toward which Strindberg 
did not tend at one period or another. By 
turns he sought the truth that lies on the 
surface and that which is hidden rather than 
revealed by outward appearances; by turns 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 93 

he spurned the mass and the individual; by 
turns he sought the secret spring of exist- 
ence in the adventitious movement of atoms 
and in the omniscient plans of a divine prin- 
ciple. But through all his seeming self- 
contradictions ran nevertheless a certain in- 
ward consistency, showing that while he 
might seek different goals at different times, 
the motives that kept him on the search were 
pretty nearly identical throughout. Thus, 
for instance, while his pendular movement 
from socialism to individualism and back 
again was accompanied by an inner stress 
gaining almost tragic strength and result- 
ing in a proportionate outward emphasis, he 
was emotionally always an individualist. 
His reason alone, taking its start from an 
uncommonly acute observation of surround- 
ing conditions, enabled him to realize the 
possibility of individuals existing for the 
sake of the race, or of life in its entirety, 
rather than for the sake of any purposes 
harbored within themselves. But action on 
this realization was invariably resisted by a 



94 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

spirit of self-sufficiency and self-concern that 
brooked no ultimate denial. 

His scepticism was as deeply rooted as 
his individualism — but so was also his 
mysticism, although for a long while he did 
his best to suppress it. He had always to 
doubt something and to believe in some- 
thing else — and he doubted and believed 
with equal fervor. During his period of 
complete religious denial, his allegiance to 
science and its formulas had in it a touch 
of superstition. When, at the hands of 
Swedenborg, he re-entered those mysterious 
regions where life's concrete multiplicity 
seems to vanish before the glory of its ab- 
stract unity, he turned his inevitable scep- 
ticism against science — while at the same 
time he was using scientific methods and data 
in proving that powers of which we wot 
nothing are carrying us to deserved destinies 
along roads that we can neither foretell nor 
avoid. 

From this we can only conclude that, in 
spite of all exaggeration, there was in him, 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 95 

by virtue of his very restlessness, a tendency 
to master that synthetic position toward 
which, in my belief, the race-mind is to-day 
particularly striving. The increasing rapid- 
ity of our oscillations during the past cen- 
tury seems to suggest our approach to a 
point where the main business in hand will 
be the reduction of life's everlasting dis- 
harmonies into a state of temporary and 
comparative harmony. It must be a har- 
mony at once shortlived and deceptive. Yet 
it will be of tremendous importance as the 
starting point of new conflicts, operating on 
a higher level than that which is now drop- 
ping behind us. It would be a gross in- 
justice to Strindberg to overlook the 
presence in his work of definite signs fore- 
shadowing the impending truce. Arch- 
individualist as he was to the last, he counted 
among his fundamental axioms that no 
human soul can exist without constructive 
interaction with other human souls. And 
when, late in life, he wanted to sum up the 
lesson of all history as read by himself, he 



96 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

did so in the words: "Everything serves!" 
In fact, he managed at almost every junc- 
ture to take a position of compromise in 
regard to at least one of the three main 
antagonisms. And his efforts at coordina- 
tion were most marked in his final and 
greatest period, although at the beginning 
of his career as artist his attitude toward 
life and its problems showed much more 
balance than during the long desert wander- 
ing of the middle period. As we behold his 
work in such plays, for example, as "The 
Dance of Death' , or "The Dream Play," 
it has passed far beyond the largely photo- 
graphic verisimilitude and the weakness for 
enumeration of detail which characterized 
so much of what we generally call naturalis- 
tic literature. He was always a realist, 
clinging closely to actual existence both in 
form and choice of subject-matter. But the 
longer he lived and worked, the more his 
realism became spiritual rather than material 
in its type. And in his latest stage it rose 
time and again to that kind of suggestive 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 97 

impressionism which I prefer to name sym- 
bolism, and which enables the mind to re- 
construct the desired picture out of a few 
salient contours. 

It must be admitted that the impression 
of Strindberg's thought as well as of his 
form frequently has a puzzling effect even 
on those long familiar with both. There 
are passages and situations in his works of 
every period that seem so quaintly naive as 
to make their author suspected of sheer 
childishness. And again there are times 
when the impartial reader can think of only 
one word as fit for the man so often reckoned 
the most modern of moderns. This word 
is "old-fashioned." But I, for one, have 
discovered that the supposed naivete may be 
a result of rare courage, enabling its pos- 
sessor to brush aside all our common arti- 
ficialities and sophistications, thereby im- 
parting to his art an atmosphere of simple 
and serene majesty. And, partly against 
my own inclination, I have been forced to 
conclude that what now strikes us as out of 



98 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

date may turn out to be far in advance of 
the time. 

There was, as I have already intimated, 
one point at which, during the greater part 
of his life, Strindberg seemed surprisingly 
out of touch with contemporary thought. In 
a period that witnessed the sudden matur- 
ing of modern feminism into a world-encir- 
cling movement of irresistible power, he as- 
sumed an attitude toward woman and her 
new aspirations that earned him the title 
of misogynist and caused much of the op- 
position he undeniably had to encounter 
during the most critical part of his life. It 
was not his original attitude. Being a man 
moved in the last instance by emotional re- 
actions and personal considerations, he be- 
gan by worshipping woman as a higher and 
purer being than man. Thereby he be- 
trayed his romantic origins. What caused 
his change of front I have already described. 
The radical character of that change made 
many people forget that from love to hatred 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 99 

is only a step, while both are far removed 
from indifference. And no matter how 
bitterly Strindberg might abuse and curse 
woman, she remained always one of his chief 
preoccupations. 

Of course, he denied on several occasions 
that he had ever felt any hatred against the 
other sex: all he wanted was to reduce 
woman to her proper position! Such a de- 
sire, however, lies really at the bottom of 
everything called hatred, which is nothing 
but apprehension on behalf of one's own 
sense of superiority. And Strindberg spoke 
more than once of women in words warrant- 
ing still harsher terms of condemnation. 
"Woman is always in the wrong when op- 
posing man, because he is the man, and she 
is an appendage to him," he said, for ex- 
ample, in "The Gothic Rooms," published 
as late as 1904. What he charged her with 
was not only a moral, but an actual biologi- 
cal inferiority. Thus the novel "At the 
Edge of the Sea," dating back to 1890, 
contains a reference to "that interme- 



100 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

diary form between man and child which 
is called woman;" while seventeen years 
later, in "Black Flags," he again as- 
serted that "woman follows man in 
the evolutionary chain and precedes the 
child." 

This remarkable opinion, which also found 
a more practical expression in his violent 
opposition to "the modern woman's mania 
for earning her own living," was, of course, 
largely referable to that "sensitiveness to 
pressure" of which I have already had to 
speak more than once. This is proved by 
his own admission in "Toward Damascus," 
where The Stranger remarks that he had 
perhaps "been jealous of his own person- 
ality, fearful lest he fall under some outside 
influence." It is still more strikingly proved 
and illuminated by a passage in "The Gothic 
Rooms," where Esther asks her mystic lover, 
Count Max, to name his greatest joy in 
life, and he answers: "Giving birth to a 
new thought, for then I am both father 
and mother, and I need not share the honor 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 101 

with some woman w T ho may run away with 
my child, saying it is hers." 

In this matter my own position is dia- 
metrically opposed to that of Strindberg. 
I have not the slightest desire to endorse 
his views on womanhood, and feel hardly 
able to defend them, but I do wish to under- 
stand and interpret them, no matter how 
widely they happen to differ from my own. 
And in a man of his calibre I am inclined 
to regard the most eccentric opinions as 
symptomatic of some overlooked social 
necessity or racial tendency, rather than of 
blindness or malice. Nor is it to be over- 
looked in this connection, that views strongly 
reminiscent of Strindberg's, though less ex- 
travagantly expressed, have been found in 
the works of men like H. G. Wells and 
Robert Herrick, none of whom can by any 
stretch of imagination be classed as a mis- 
ogynist. 

Primarily Strindberg's attitude was a 
personal reaction, as I have already sug- 
gested, but life stands always ready to make 



102 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

use of our private little likes and dislikes 
for the furthering of its own inscrutable pur- 
poses. And I believe that we are here in 
the presence of a new racial movement, 
tending less to oppose the emancipation of 
woman than to arouse man to a fuller un- 
derstanding of his own nature and mission. 
For ages the world was man-ruled — so much 
so that any undermining of the male su- 
premacy seemed inconceivable. This con- 
dition had, in the end, the effect of helping 
the feministic agitation that has now been 
carried on with growing intensity and suc- 
cess for more than a century. For while 
the men were opposed to the demands made 
by the women, their opposition took merely 
the form of passive indifference, as they 
never dreamt that their own power might 
become endangered. 

That to-day we may talk of a decided 
"feminization" of the world, I regard as 
unquestionable. Personally I do not regret 
this process, which I hold both inevitable 
and beneficial, but I can nevertheless easily 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 103 

imagine the future development of it to a 
point where the correcting influence of the 
male spirit might become practically an- 
nulled. I am not having in mind anything 
so ridiculous as the possible subjugation of 
man by woman, but the establishment of 
onesided ideals tending to rob the race of 
the impetus toward variation, innovation 
and abstraction commonly supposed to in- 
here in the male character. 

The man who, as Strindberg did in "At 
the Edge of the Sea," could refer to the 
ideal woman imaged by one of his heroes 
as "a woman born with intelligence enough 
to recognize the inferiority of her own sex 
to the other one," seems to me at once some- 
thing more and something less than a 
misogynist or anti-feminist. If a label he 
must have, it would be better to make it 
masculinist. Strindberg was, in fact, a frank 
upholder of the intrinsic superiority of his 
own sex, and as such vehemently and in- 
stinctively opposed to the equally frank 
feminism of men like Ibsen and Bjornson, 



104 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Thanks to his almost preternatural sen- 
sitiveness to any impending alteration of 
racial tendencies, he may have foreseen the 
possibility I have just outlined. And 
thanks to his private relationship to various 
women bent on resisting his encroachments 
upon their own individualities, if not on at- 
tempting an invasion of his, he may also 
have been moved more quickly and more 
powerfully than others to oppose the danger 
which, at the worst, must be lying in the 
lap of a still unborn day. Read in this light, 
I think much in his work that now seems 
unintelligible or objectionable may appear 
worthy of more serious consideration. And 
the lesson to be drawn from that element 
in his work would prompt no futile efforts 
at suppression of the woman movement, but 
should instead lead to a more conscious 
preservation and cultivation of certain 
qualities held to be particularly charac- 
teristic of masculinity, if not of manhood. 
Out of the more evenly balanced conflict be- 
tween aroused masculinism and liberated 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 105 

feminism the race would then by degrees 
issue at another kind of synthesis or com- 
promise which might appropriately be 
named humanism. 

Before leaving this phase of Strindberg's 
art, I wish to point out that his attitude 
toward woman, as toward everything else 
in life, had its modifications and qualifica- 
tions, some of which were determined by 
reason and others by sentiment. Speaking 
of his fairy pla}^ "Swanwhite," a Swedish 
critic has remarked that "one is surprised 
to find him painting a female figure with 
nothing but light, attractive and joyous 
colors." The explanation is quite simple. 
In spite of the charming love story that runs 
through the play in question, the little 
Princess Swanwhite is primarily pictured 
as daughter, and not as mistress or mate. 
To her creator she was a child to the end — ■ 
one of those blessed beings whom he wor- 
shipped when all the rest of mankind seemed 
hateful. 

About the woman with matured powers he 



106 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

night write as he did in "Toward Damascus" 
(Part III) : "I sought in woman an angel 
who was to lend me wings, and I fell into 
the arms of the earth spirit, who smothered 
me among pillows she had filled with her 
own wing feathers." (Compare this with 
what Robert Herrick makes one of his fe- 
male characters say in "The Healer": "We 
women are but chance vessels for a man's 
will — or devils to destroy him when he proves 
to be less than man.") Even woman as a 
mother was not free from his fierce question- 
ing and fiercer accusations, as he showed in 
the one-act play "Mother-Love," and again 
in such a late production as the "chamber 
play" named "The Pelican." In the latter 
case, however, we must bear in mind that 
what he really assailed was hypocrisy, and 
that his main thesis was that no human feel- 
ing is sacred enough to protect it against 
abuse. But, to return to the point I wanted 
to make, against the child, whatever its sex, 
he could never employ that blasting power 
of invective which otherwise spared nothing. 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 107 

And two of his happiest efforts, the fairy 
plays "Lucky-Pehr's Journey" and "The 
Slippers of Abu Casern," were prompted by 
his desire to please two favorite daughters 
of his own, one of whom I believe also to 
have inspired the figure of Swanwhite which 
so surprised the Swedish critic. 

There are two distinct currents — not op- 
posed, but parallel — discernible in Strind- 
berg's later work. One of these moves on 
the surface. It is concerned with the means 
rather than the end, with the road rather 
than the goal. It brings us back to those 
strange soul-adventures by which he found 
his way to a "full, rock-firm certitude," de- 
clared by himself, not long before his death, 
to have been the chief gain of his middle-age 
crisis. The elements entering into this cur- 
rent are not only mystical but occult. They 
are derived in part from Swedenborg, and 
in part from the picturesque French 
dreamer and mystic signing himself "Sar" 
Peladan. But principally they must have 



108 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

sprung from Strindberg's own experience 
in moments of abnormal tension. 

What happened to him, or seemed to hap- 
pen at least, when he was striving to make 
gold by the transmutation of baser metals, 
and what he described to us with such be- 
wildering exactitude in his "Inferno" and 
"Legends," has become objectively pro- 
jected in the rest of his work from that 
period. The world without is deeply colored 
by the purple flame within. Coincidence is 
law. It is the fingerpoint of Providence, 
the signal to man that he must beware. 
Mystery is the gospel: the mystery implied 
in the knitting together of man to man, of 
fact to fact, deep beneath the surface of 
things. Few writers could take us into such 
a realm of probable impossibilities and pos- 
sible improbabilities without losing all claim 
to serious consideration. If Strindberg thus 
ventured to our gain and no loss of his own, 
his success can be explained only by the 
presence in his work of that second, deeper 
current of thought and feeling. 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 109 

This is as simple as the current nearer 
the surface is fantastic. It is the tangible 
embodiment of that "rock-firm certitude" 
to which I have already referred. It is the 
faith which he strove to make his own during 
youth, and which, as earnestly, he strove to 
deny and demolish during early manhood. 
Of its character and his new look upon it 
he spoke as follows in one of his late pam- 
phlets ("Religious Renascence") : "In the 
'Blue Books' I have returned to Christianity 
as the only form of spiritual life possible 
to me. In my great need I took what was 
ready at hand; and instructed by Sweden- 
borg that a man is born into the religion of 
his country as well as into its nationality, 
I adopted as postulate (or sheet anchor) the 
faith into which I had been baptized and 
confirmed. With a little goe»d will, I got 
reason into the dogmas and accepted every- 
thing. From this I suffered no harm; but 
I could as well have taken my Christianity 
without dogmas — with only the Bible as 
basis, and without any reasoning about it. 



110 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

And that is what I am doing at this mo- 
ment." 

Elsewhere (in his "Speeches to the 
Swedish Nation") he has given this ex- 
planation of what religion meant to him- 
self, and what he felt it ought to mean to 
others : "Only through religion, or the hope 
of something better, and the recognition of 
the innermost meaning of life as that of an 
ordeal, a school, or perhaps a penitentiary, 
will it be possible to bear the burden of life 
with sufficient resignation." 

It is thoroughly in keeping with Strind- 
berg's nature and its queer blend of com- 
plexity and simplicity, that, at the beginning 
of the twentieth century, he should insist 
on believing in a personal deity and its direct 
interference in human affairs, while at the 
same time the object of his religious faith 
was purely moral. For a moralist he was 
first of all, and he was so inevitably by virtue 
of that emotional undercurrent which, to my 
mind, gave the primary impetus to all his 
actions and reactions. It was the same 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 111 

whether he dealt with religion or politics — 
for even when he called himself a socialist, 
he was thinking much more of duties than 
of rights. And this passion of his for the 
plain and humble virtues of life, for frank- 
ness and kindness and square dealing be- 
tween man and man, never left him, never 
abated its ardor. It stayed with him 
throughout that middle period which he him- 
self looked upon with regret and disap- 
proval. Even then he was not much of an 
atheist, as several remarks by Gustav in 
"Creditors" prove amply ; even then he held 
the faith which he thought lost, as is shown 
in the same play when Tehla suggests that 
a belief in a Providence or in a blind fate 
has the same effect of relieving man from all 
liability, and Gustav answers: 

"To some extent, yes, but there is always 
a narrow margin left unprotected, and there 
the liability applies in spite of all. And 
sooner or later the creditors make their ap- 
pearance. Guiltless, but responsible. Guilt- 
less in regard to him who is no more; 



112 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

responsible to oneself and one's fellow- 
beings!" 

Both in the world of art and in that of 
thought, Strindberg undoubtedly had orig- 
inal ideas to offer. He was, for instance, 
one of the first among modern thinkers who 
dared, in the face of abuse and ridicule, to 
maintain the underlying unity of the ele- 
ments and their probable transmutability, 
and he did so on strictly scientific grounds, 
thereby forestalling the position since then 
arrived at by Sir William Ramsay and 
others. His misfortune was that neither one 
of those worlds was really his own. Beauty 
was needful to him, but not all-sufficient. 
Truth fascinated him always, even when it 
appeared as its own only object, but it could 
never in that form outlive his impetuous 
craving for application. Sooner or later he 
would always return to the ethical view of 
life, to the question of right and wrong — 
and in this field, though most dear to 
him, he had nothing original to offer, 
nothing that compared with Ibsen's pro- 



AUGUST STRIXDBERG 113 

phetic reinterpretation of human duties and 
desires. 

But Strindberg's contribution to the art 
of living — which is, after all, the proper 
name for applied ethics — must not on this 
account be scorned or slighted. It was his 
mission to turn us back to truths and vir- 
tues so overlaid with the dust of philo- 
sophical discussion that they had grown 
nearly invisible. Being a sentimentalist he 
was an incurable rebel. But as he lived in 
a time when to be orthodox was to question 
all that the past had believed in, his rebellion 
drove him back into that very past in search 
of the firm ground his spirit craved. There 
is nothing to be regretted in this. The move- 
ment of all life is cyclic. We never return 
to the point once passed, but after a time 
we are certain to draw near to it in order to 
pick, from above, what the law of compen- 
sation forced us to surrender temporarily as 
price for our passing of that point. Thus 
the ascending spiral of progress is formed. 

What we may regret about Strindberg's 



114 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

spirit is that, in his return to the past for 
lost treasures, he could not carry with him 
more of the light gained by the race along 
the road he retraced. I am thinking of his 
essential pessimism, which he never out- 
lived. He was brave, no doubt, but his 
bravery in face of life and its problems did 
not rise above resignation. And such an 
attitude of submission to a fate over which 
we have no power whatever does not satisfy 
to-day's humanity. Even at that, however, 
he had much to teach us, and in particular 
three things : 1 ) that man is part of a larger 
whole, and not an end in himself; 2) that 
duties are of much greater importance than 
rights, both to ourselves and to the rest of 
life; 3) that this life grows meaningless un- 
less we accept it as a preparation for some- 
thing lying beyond and above it. And as 
Strindberg was never dogmatic about either 
the causes or purposes of life, as long as 
such causes and purposes were admitted to 
exist, it should be possible for us to receive 
what he brought us out of the past and to 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 115 

use it in our own way — the way of a time 
that seems about to realize how far the es- 
sence of all wisdom lies in seeking the truth 
along more than one road. 



In trying to fathom and estimate the 
spirit of Strindberg, let us always bear in 
mind the indubitable sincerity and tremen- 
dous earnestness which stamped all he did 
and said as with a seal of fire. He was one 
of those rare few who always meant what 
he said, and who meant it with all there was 
in him of emotional and intellectual power. 
Too implicitly, perhaps, he believed in the 
validity of his own mission, and unneces- 
sarily, perhaps, he believed that silence al- 
ways stood for approval when big matters 
were at stake. But his sense of mission was 
combined with a never-resting self-distrust 
that, at the best, made him regard himself 
as a tool chastised for purposes of better 
service. And his themes gripped deeply and 
strongly into life as actually lived. He was 
always dealing with things that matter, and 



116 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

mostly with things that matter vastly. 
Every mood was known to him, the tenderest 
as well as the harshest. Generally a certain 
stern grimness prevailed with him, but no 
matter how sternly he might deal with 
others, there was none of whom he demanded 
so much as of himself. In more respects 
than one he was comparable to one of those 
loud-voiced and sharp-tongued old Hebrew 
prophets, whose temper and language he 
seemed to share in equal degree. Once he 
was named by a critic the artistic conscience 
of his own country. But as I see him, he 
shared with Ibsen and Tolstoy the soul- 
saddening task of being the spiritual con- 
science of the entire period to which he be- 
longed — a period which we have outlived, 
but whose lessons we have still to master. 



IV 

A REVISED LIST OF AUGUST 
STRINDBERG'S WORKS AR- 
RANGED IN CHRONO- 
LOGICAL ORDER 

Plays 

1869-85. The Freethinker. Hermione. 
In Rome. The Outlaw. A. D. Forty- 
eight. Master Olof (or The Renegade) ; 
two versions. The Secret of the Guild. Sir 
Bengt's Lady. Lucky-Pehr's Journey. 

1886-96. The People at Hemso. The 
Father. Miss Julia. Comrades. Creditors. 
Pariah. Simoom. The Stronger. Playing 
with Fire. The Link. Facing Death. The 
First Warning. Debit and Credit. Mother- 
Love. The Keys of Heaven. 

1897-1912. Toward Damascus, I-IIL 
117i 



118 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Advent. There Are Crimes and Crimes. 
The Saga of the Folkungs. Gustavus Vasa. 
Eric XIV. Gustavus Adolphus. Mid- 
summer. Easter. The Dance of Death, 
I and II. Engelbrecht. Charles XII. The 
Crown Bride. Swanwhite. The Dream 
Play. Queen Christina. Gustavus III. 
The Nightingale of Wittenberg. Storm. 
The Fire Ruins. The Spook Sonata. The 
Pelican. The Black Glove. Earl Birger. 
The National Director. The Last Knight. 
The Slippers of Abu Casern. The Great 
Highway. 

Novels and Stories 

1869-85. Spring Time. The Red Room. 
Swedish Events and Adventures, I and II. 
Marriage, I. Real Utopias. 

1886-96. Marriage, II. The People at 
Hemso. Fisher Folks. Chandalah. The 
Island of the Blessed. At the Edge of the 
Sea. Fables. 

1897-1912. Sagas. The Gothic Rooms. 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 119 

Historical Miniatures. New Swedish Ad- 
ventures. Black Flags. The Scapegoat. 

AUTOBIOGKAPHICAL FlCTION 

1869-85. He and She. Going Home to 
Be Tried. 

1886-96. The Bondwoman's Son. When 
the Sap Is Stirring. In the Red Room. 
The Author. A Fool's Confession. 

1897-1912. Inferno. Legends. Fair- 
haven and Foulstrand. Alone. 

Verse 

1869-85. Poems. Somnambulistic Day- 
Dreams. 

1897-1912. Word-Play. 

Historical and Scientific Works 

1869-85. Studies of Civilization. The 
Swedish People in War and Peace. 

1886-96. Among French Peasants. On 



120 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the Relations Between France and Sweden. 
Jar din des plant es. Antibarbarus. Types 
and Prototypes. 

1897-1912. The Conscious Will Revealed 
in History. A Free Norway. The Origins 
of the Swedish Language. Biblical Proper 
Names. The Roots of the Great Languages. 
China and Japan. The Democratic State. 

Essays, Criticism, Etc. 

1869-85. The New Kingdom. A Little 
of Everything. From Italy. 

1886-96. Little Studies of Plants and 
Animals. Pieces Printed and Unprinted, 
I and II. 

1897-1912. The Blue Books, I-III. 
Letters and Memoranda to the Members of 
the Intimate Theatre; two pamphlets. 
Studies of Shakespeare's Dramas; three 
pamphlets. Speeches to the Swedish Na- 
tion. Religious Renascence. 



BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON 

Poet, Politician, Prophet 

SOME writers, like Ibsen, seem to disap- 
pear behind their own work. With 
Bjornstjerne Bjornson it was different. In 
his case the man tended constantly to ob- 
scure the work. The reason lies near at 
hand. Ibsen, for instance, concentrated all 
his efforts toward a single point of attack — 
the modern drama. Bjornson, on the other 
hand, aimed always at covering the whole 
front line of human progress. Wherever he 
saw the spirit of man struggling to rise above 
its present level, there he must needs give 
help. In doing so he used his art frankly 
as a means to an end. The wonder of it is 
that Bjornson nevertheless proved himself 
a great and exquisite artist. 

In some quarters, especially Scandina- 
121 



122 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

vian, it was long the fashion to praise his 
poetry while regretting — or even reviling — 
his activity as reformer, patriot and moralist. 
Yet this meant a denial of all that Bjornson 
really stood for. And it implied a con- 
demnation of his art as well, if this is seen 
in the light I have just suggested. For he 
was first of all a teacher and fighter and 
prophet — not a shaper of beautiful forms. 
To him the form was always subordinate to 
the spirit, art to life. What actuated his 
whole being, coloring his written and spoken 
words, his public actions and private life, 
was his passion for truth, for cleanliness of 
soul, for the binding of man to man by ties 
of love instead of force. For this faith he 
fought untiringly during sixty years. At 
the same time he placed his whole mighty 
personality, with all its splendid gifts, 
against every form of oppression, whether 
exercised upon individuals, classes, or entire 
nations. 

Though the son of a country minister, he 
sprang from a long line of peasant fore- 



BJORNSON 123 

fathers. In the heart of the real country, 
among the peasants, he was born and reared. 
And throughout his long life he never broke 
that once established contact with nature 
and the mass of common men. In later 
years it made him buy a big farm in the 
very heart of the Norwegian uplands. Not 
only did he make Aulestad, as he called it, 
his true home, but he found time to turn 
it into a model farm in order that his coun- 
trymen might profit by his example. 

To his ancestry and upbringing must be 
traced his unswerving, life-long faith in 
modern democracy. To the same origin may 
also be attributed a vitality that seemed in- 
exhaustible and that made his antipathies as 
well as his sympathies nearly irresistible. 
To come near him, or even to read his 
printed words, sufficed to make one con- 
scious of the wonderful power that emanated 
from him and that drew other men to him 
as the magnet draws the steel. A friend 
said of him once that "there was not an un- 
developed muscle in his body nor an unused 



124 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

cell in his brain." This physical and mental 
wholesomeness went far to explain the in- 
tensity of his passion for purity in the 
highest sense of that word. 

From first to last his spirit showed a 
spontaneity and freshness of sympathy and 
interest that kept him youthful up to the 
very moment when the first forewarning of 
approaching death reached him. He was 
ever seeking new truths to master and new 
causes to champion. In this search he was 
invariably guided by what he deemed right, 
not by what the world held expedient. As 
he was in great things, so he was in small 
ones — a big child, with a warm heart and a 
keen mind. He was already full of years 
and fame when he told a friend that the 
possession of a new pair of trousers made 
him get up an hour ahead of time in order 
that he might get that much more enjoy- 
ment out of putting them on for the first 
time. One Christmas when, in accordance 
with ancient custom, melted tallow had been 
sprinkled on the ground for the titmice to 



BJORNSON 125 

feast on, his wife saw him sitting in a very 
uncomfortable position near one of the win- 
dows of his study. 

"Why," he cried in response to her ques- 
tion, "I have to watch the sparrows, of 
course, or they will steal the tallow away 
from the titmice." 

That was the man of whom a friend said 
that "he risked his reputation at least once a 
year for some cause he believed in." It was 
the same man, too, who wrote to Zola while 
a majority of the French people were con- 
demning them both for their defense of 
Dreyfus: "The relation of a poet to his 
works should be like that of a bank to the 
currency it issues — there must be plenty of 
good securities in the vaults." 

One day in the early fifties he startled the 
Norwegian capital by appearing at the only 
theatre as the leader of 600 youths armed 
with whistles. The storm that followed 
ended the sway of Danish acting and Danish 
language on the Norwegian stage. Thus 
he entered upon his lifework of reestablish- 



126 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ing the national spirit of his country on a 
higher and more genuine level. In that long 
struggle, which exposed him to so much 
hatred both at home and abroad, his cry 
was not "My country, right or wrong," but 
always, "Norway must do right at any cost !" 
For this reason he never deserved the name 
of politician, as this has generally been ap- 
plied in the past. But he accepted it gladly, 
declaring that politics should be to the social 
body what morals are to the individual. 

It was during those first, feverishly active 
years that he wrote his peasant stories and 
thus made Norwegian poetry appreciated 
beyond its native boundaries. While those 
firstlings of his pen have at times been un- 
duly exalted at the expense of his riper 
work, one must grant them an originality 
and a charm that secure them a place 
entirely by themselves. Such stories as 
"Synnove Solbakken," "Arne," and "A 
Happy Boy" have perhaps a wider appeal 
than anything else Bjornson wrote. Nor 
is the interest attaching to them merely 



BJORNSON 127 

artistic. In building them — as well as the 
first plays, dating from the same period — 
he applied truly historic methods to art. 
According to his own assertion, he reached 
his results "by viewing the peasant in the 
light of the old Sagas, and the Sagas in the 
light of modern peasant life." 

To consider what Bjornson tried to do 
and actually did during the fifties and sixties 
is like looking into a fairy world, unaffected 
by ordinary human limitations. There was 
not a movement afoot in which he did not 
take part for or against. There was riot 
a public question raised that he did not have 
to discuss in speech and writing. He was 
newspaper editor and contributor, theatrical 
director and playwright, political agitator 
and leader, poet and novelist — all at the 
same time and in bewildering alternation. 
A mere youth, he did more than most to 
build that radical party of the Left, which 
has now shaped the destinies of Norway for 
more than a quarter-century. Through his 
patriotic poems he stirred the national spirit 



128 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

as it had never been stirred before, and one 
of those poems — "Yes, We Love the Land 
that Bore Us" — took such hold of the people 
that, in a very few years, it became the 
national hymn. 

In the seventies his life took on a new 
aspect. He travelled and wrote. Secret, 
silent forces were at work within him. In 
quick succession he produced eight modern 
plays, each one of which struck to the heart 
of some vital question then uppermost in 
the mind of the public. In "The Editor" 
he dealt not so much with the press as with 
the kind of men that were frequently in con- 
trol of it in those days — self-seeking free- 
booters without any sense of social respon- 
sibility. "A Business Failure" and "The 
New System" attacked and exposed the 
commercial spirit, the passion for speculation 
and unearned gains, the falseness and shal- 
lowness of so-called "social" life. In "The 
King" he pictured the blighting effect of the 
monarchical convention not upon the people 
but upon the monarch himself. 



BJORNSON 129 

But none of these dramas of modern life 
created such a sensation — not only in Nor- 
way but all through the Western world — 
as "A Gauntlet," in which Bjornson dared 
to deny the need of a double standard of 
sexual morality for men and women. In 
some ways the powerful woman movement 
in the Scandinavian countries may be dated 
back to that one play, with its inexorable 
demand, not that both sexes have equal right 
to live as they please, but that both have 
equal duty to keep themselves pure in body 
and spirit. To few other questions has 
Bjornson returned so frequently and with 
so much fervor as to this one. He dealt 
with it again in his two great novels, "The 
House of the Kurts" and "In God's Ways." 
He made it the subject of a lecture on 
"Monogamy or Polygamy," which, in 1887, 
he delivered in more than sixty different 
places within the three Scandinavian coun- 
tries and Finland. And it enters into almost 
everything else he has ever written. 

That nature may require man to live a 



130 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

different life from woman's he would never 
admit. And he insisted on tracing much 
of what is evil, both in the existence of the 
individual and of the race, to false sexual 
ideals and relationships. On the other hand, 
he kept himself free from the prudishness 
generally displayed by advocates of similar 
opinions in other countries. Love was to 
him always the great moving power of the 
world, and he could imagine no love more 
beautiful or compelling than that which 
draws the right man to the right woman 
and holds both together in a union for life. 

With his criticism of the traditional male 
attitude in sex matters, Ejornson combined 
from the first a demand that women be given 
full economical, social, and political equality 
with men. This he did not only out of a 
sense of abstract justice but also because, 
like Ibsen and Auguste Comte, he believed 
that the future of the race rested largely 
with the classes hitherto kept away from 
public affairs — that is, with women and 
workmen. Step by step he brought his 



BJORNSON 131 

countrymen round to his own viewpoint in 
this matter, and to-day Norway stands in 
this respect practically where Bjornson 
would have it ; the rights and duties of man 
are also the rights and duties of woman, and 
no class is excluded from full participation 
in the government. 

All his life Bjornson was deeply religious. 
During his earlier years he found in Chris- 
tianity a satisfactory expression for this 
phase of his being. And it was with sincere 
sorrow that he saw Ibsen taking a more and 
more negative attitude toward the accepted 
creed of his country. In the seventies, how- 
ever, Bjornson passed through a crisis, as 
I have already told. The concrete truths 
of modern science claimed his attention to 
an increasing extent. He read Darwin, 
Spencer and Mill. Little by little the old 
faith fell away from him. The reflections 
of that period appear in the charming novel 
named "Dust." But though the dogmas 
of Christianity lost their meaning for him, 
his spirit retained its essentially religious 



132 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

quality. In no work is this more clearly- 
evidenced than in the first part of his 
great double play, "Beyond Our Power." 
Next to the peasant stories it is probably 
the work best known in the English-speak- 
ing countries. Here, as on the other side, 
it has been much misunderstood. That it 
offers chances for contradictory construc- 
tions cannot be denied. But read in con- 
junction with the second part — written after 
an interval of twelve years and dealing with 
modern social conditions — it seems to tell 
man that his faith cannot be placed with 
safety on the miracles promised either by 
religious or social extremists. 

It was in the eighties — after a prolonged 
visit to the United States, where he exer- 
cised a powerful influence on the numerous 
Scandinavians in the West, and where he 
also developed a passionate admiration for 
Lincoln — that Bjornson earned his nick- 
name of "Norway's uncrowned king." 
Rarely in human history has the life of a 
people been to such an extent focused in the 



BJORNSON 133 

life of a single individual, who yet was 
merely a private citizen. While determined 
that Norway should have no foreign guar- 
dianship, Bjornson was at no time moved 
by hostility to Sweden or any other nation. 
Behind his fervent nationalism lay a no less 
fervent hope for a united Scandinavia; but 
the union, he felt, must be voluntary and 
based on complete equality. Here, as al- 
ways, the fundamental motive was his faith 
in modern democracy. And even in those 
days he was already cherishing the still 
vaster dream of a great Pan-Germanic 
federation, rooted not in conquest or in the 
suppression of the smaller nationalities, but 
in free cooperation and common cultural in- 
terests. 

The "clean flag," without the customary 
union mark at the upper corner, was the 
symbol he selected for his new Norway. 
For this symbol he fought against one-half 
of his own nation and all Sweden. At the 
same time he declared openly that he wanted 
"to dissolve the union in the minds of the 



134 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

people," and how well he did that work was 
shown in 1905. But he insisted on peaceful 
methods, respect for the rights of the other 
side, and postponement of final action until 
all Norwegian parties could agree on a com- 
mon program. The irony of fate would 
have it that when the deciding crisis arrived 
at last he could take no part. He disap- 
proved of the methods chosen for the break- 
ing of the union. Once the break had oc- 
curred, however, he turned around in eager 
defense of his people before the rest of the 
world. As on many previous occasions, he 
achieved this through a series of brilliant 
articles and letters contributed to the lead- 
ing European newspapers and periodicals. 
They used to say while Norway had not yet 
a diplomatic service of its own, that such an 
institution was not needed as long as Bjorn- 
son represented the country abroad. 

What occupied his mind more than any- 
thing else during the last period of his life 
was probably the idea of universal peace 
with its attendant substitution of arbitra- 



BJORNSON 135 

tion for war. To him it seemed clear that 
such an idea could never become materialized 
except through the reformation of all in- 
ternational and inter-racial relationships on 
a basis of mutual sympathy and justice. 
He demanded national cleanliness and 
righteousness as he had formerly demanded 
those virtues of the individual. In the pur- 
suit of these new ideals he became the fear- 
less champion of all human groups held in 
forced subjugation to some stronger group. 
Time and again he took up the pen on be- 
half of the Finlanders against Russia, of 
the Slovaks against Hungary, of the Danes 
and the Poles against Prussia. Nothing 
could better prove his sincerity and courage 
than that his defense of these suffering 
nationalities was undertaken at a time when 
his own country was still greatly in need of 
the moral support of the powers he at- 
tacked. 

His last years were rendered singularly 
happy by the growing comprehension of his 
spirit everywhere. His visit to Paris in 



136 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

1901 was more triumphant in some respects 
than that of a crowned monarch. The cele- 
bration of his seventieth birthday anniver- 
sary in 1902 engaged the attention of the 
whole civilized world. In 1903 he was given 
the Nobel prize for literature, and acknowl- 
edged the honor in a remarkable address on 
"poetry as a manifestation of the sense of 
vital surplus." What he was to his own 
people is best made clear by an incident 
which occurred at his beloved Aulestad not 
long before he was forced to start on his final 
journey to Paris in vain search of another 
lease of health and life. A regiment passed 
the place in the course of a manoeuvre. 
Its commander sent word ahead to the poet 
asking him to review the soldiers as they 
marched by. Bjornson stood on the veranda 
of his house, surrounded by his entire 
family — a man who had never held any 
public office, mind you! As the troop ap- 
proached on the highroad below, officers and 
men gave the salute due to a commanding 
general or a member of the royal house. 



BJORNSON 137 

But this was not all. From the rapidly 
moving ranks rose one mighty shout after 
another — a spontaneous outburst of devo- 
tion and gratitude such as it has been 
granted very few men the fortune to in- 
spire. 

Bjornson was nearly seventy-seven years 
old when, in 1909, he brought out a new 
play — his last finished work — which was 
given with surprising success in the Scan- 
dinavian countries and Germany. Among 
other works from that final period, when the 
poet had already crossed the supposed boun- 
dary line of creative power, may be men- 
tioned the charming novel "Mary" and not 
less than four plays: "Paul Lange and 
Tora Parsberg," "Laboremus," "At Stor- 
hove," and "Dayland." In several of these 
he took sharp issue against the exaggerated 
individualism which had fed on Nietzsche 
and which seemed particularly to attract the 
youth all over the world. 

When at last the message came that the 
man who so long had seemed invincible was 



138 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

about to be conquered by death, a hush 
fell over all Scandinavia. For the first time 
in years, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes 
forgot their perennial bickerings in a united 
outpouring of apprehension and sorrow. 
Everybody saw suddenly in the dying poet 
the principal embodiment of their kinship 
and their common cultural heritage. He 
who, in the prime of his manhood, had so 
often been accused of sowing strife and 
misunderstanding, was now recognized as 
the man who had bidden each people "to 
be itself in truth" in order that it might 
more fully win the respect and confidence 
of all the others. 

The news of his death, which took place 
at Paris in April, 1910, was everywhere 
received with a conviction that his passing 
implied the loss of a great heart, capable 
of embracing the whole world in its love, 
and of a poet whose purpose was identical 
with the triumphant progress of all hu- 
manity. 



THE STORY OF SELMA 
LAGERLOF 

SELMA LAGERLOF is one of the 
greatest of an increasing group of 
writers who represent a synthesis of two 
past literary epochs, and who, for this rea- 
son, must be held especially representative 
of the literary epoch that is now coming. 
She has revived not only the courage but 
the ability to feel and dream and aspire that 
belonged to the scorned romanticists of the 
early nineteenth century. But this recovery 
of something long held to be lost and out- 
lived forever she has achieved for us with- 
out surrender of that intimate connection 
between poetry and real life which was es- 
tablished by the naturalists in the latter half 
of the same century. The romanticists 
spoke to our hearts alone. The naturalists 
spoke only to our heads. For the men ar±d 
139 



140 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

women of the new epoch we have not yet 
found an adequate name, but we know that 
they are speaking to head and heart alike. 
We know that Selma Lagerlof's brightest 
fairy raiments are woven out of what to the 
ordinary mind would seem like the most 
commonplace patches of everyday life — and 
we know as well that when she tempts us 
into far-off, fantastic worlds of her own 
making, her ultimate object is to help us 
see the inner meanings of the too often over- 
emphasized superficial actualities of our 
own existence. 

"The Saga of the Making of a Saga"— 
such is the English equivalent of the title 
to a little story in which Miss Lagerlof has 
described how she came to write the book 
that, by a single stroke, brought her a na- 
tional reputation and started her on the road 
to international fame. That book was 
"Gosta Berling's Saga." 

It appeared with meteoric suddenness 
out of the deep obscurity which surrounds 



SELMxV LAGERLOF 141 

any schoolteacher in a small country town. 
Prior to that momentous event the existence 
of its author had been spent in almost 
cloistered seclusion, far from the highways 
of culture and from the kind of men and 
events that make history and headlines in 
the newspapers. Of what the world calls 
life she had had no taste. Of what it names 
doing she had done nothing. Therefore, 
the world wondered greatly at the unfore- 
shadowed feat, repeating anew its perennial 
cry: "Can anything good come out of 
Nazareth — or out of Landskrona?" When 
she produced a second book almost as good 
as the first one, the wonder increased. But 
thereafter she was accepted as one of those 
from whom it is natural to expect great 
things. Within a surprisingly short time 
her books and her name spread beyond her 
native country. And to-day, at the age of 
fifty-four, this unaccountable old spinster 
is known and loved throughout the whole 
Western world, not as the lucky winner of 
the $40,000 Nobel prize for literature (given 



142 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

her in 1909), but as a seldom surpassed 
teller of fairy tales of the rare kind that 
may be read with equal pleasure by children 
and grown-ups. 

There is an inland province of Sweden 
called Warmland. It is full of big forests 
and small lakes, of rough rocks and merry 
rivers, of great beauties and humble homes. 
It is poor in wealth, but rich in men and 
dreams. Out of it have come some of 
Sweden's finest and sweetest poets. There 
Selma Lagerlof was born in an old rectory 
named Marbacka, which, with all its quiet 
charms, she has pictured in a chapter of her 
first book headed "Lilliecrona's Home." 
She was an introspective, sickly child, and 
while her brothers and sisters roamed freely 
around the countryside, she tarried at home 
and listened enraptured to those innumera- 
ble tales and legends with which that 
province has always been alive. Out of a 
swarming multitude of such tales — told now 
by her father, now by the servants, and now 



SELMA LAGERLOF 143 

again by some old crone drifting in for a 
meal — one stood out brighter, more fascinat- 
ing than all the others. It was the tale of 
the old cavaliers that rode from manor to 
manor, making the whole region ring with 
their merry laughter and their crazy pranks. 
Her ears were alwa} T s open to anything told, 
but this tale alone had a power over her 
heart that none other might exert. 

Those tales stirred restless longings in her 
heart. They seemed to be calling to her, 
whispering to her about some great task 
that she was to perform some time. Grad- 
ually her vague longings shaped themselves 
into a passionate wish that she, herself, 
might become a weaver of tales to which 
not only silent little home-sitting girls but 
the whole wide world might listen. But 
what she never imagined was that the task 
waiting for her might be to retell the verj r 
tales that had grown so dear to her heart, 
tales that even her love looked upon as mere 
gossip of the countryside. 

When not listening, she read; and when 



1U VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

not reading, she wrote. An endless stream 
of wild, romantic adventures flowed from 
her pen, each one more unreal and unorig- 
inal than the preceding one. Her heroes 
represented every age but her own. They 
hailed from every corner of the globe but 
Warmland. Most of them had lived before 
— in the Arabian Nights, in the Icelandic 
sagas, or in the romances of Walter Scott. 
In those days it never occurred to her that 
heroes not less worthy to be sung might 
be found much nearer to herself — even in 
her own memory, where dwelt those old 
cavaliers of Ekeby. 

When not listening or reading or writing, 
she was "going about waiting for fortune 
to arrive." This fortune her dreams pic- 
tured in the form of a great publisher who 
was to discover by mere chance what she 
had written and find it so wonderful that 
he had to publish it. "And then," to quote 
her own words, "everything else would fol- 
low as a matter of course." Strange to say, 
that was pretty much what did happen at 



SELMA LAGERLOF 145 

last, but not until many years later, when 
she had long ceased to wait for the fortune 
that seemed never to come. 

At twenty-two she went to Stockholm to 
study at the Normal School in order that 
she might earn her living as a teacher. Still 
the dream of a writer's fame lingered within 
her. Still the old legends were filling her 
mind like so much mist, and still she was 
straining her eyes to glimpse the great 
stories she felt sure were lying beyond that 
mist. One day she was walking alone along 
one of the streets of Stockholm — a most 
ordinary street, without a trace of beauty 
or poetry to set it apart — when all of a 
sudden a great light blazed up within her. 
At the heart of that light she saw what she 
was to tell — saw the tale — saw that it was 
the old familiar one of the cavaliers at 
Ekeby — saw that it brought her heroes as 
luminous as any known to poetry. In that 
moment of vision she conceived her future 
mission so vividly that it made her stop right 
where she was. And as she stood there "the 



146 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

whole street rose up toward the sky and 
sank down again, rose up and sank down." 
And when she returned to reality once more, 
she must needs look around with blushing 
cheeks and her mind wondering whether, 
perchance, others had also seen what she 
saw, or whether they had merely seen the 
foolish way in which she was behaving. 

She did not enter at once upon the task 
she knew now to be hers, for while she had 
discovered what she had to tell, she had not 
yet learned how she was to tell it. Years 
of hard study and hard labor for a living 
passed by before more light came. She 
tried and tried — and mostly in the manner 
of the day. Remember that it was the day 
of naturalism, of photography, of preoccu- 
pation with surface appearances. How 
could fairy tales — even though they were 
real — be told in the manner of such a day? 
So she strove in vain, her material and her 
form refusing obstinately to meet in that 
harmony which makes a real story. She 
tried verse and she tried to wield the old 



SELMA LAGERLOF 147 

tale into a drama. "No, no, no!" it cried — 
and there she was, until one day word 
reached her that her old parental home was 
to be sold. 

She journeyed in haste to have one more 
sight of it before it ceased to be a home — 
and there, in her childhood surroundings, 
the final inspiration came to her. The spirit 
of romanticism which had lain dead and 
buried so many years came to life again 
and took up its abode in her soul, filling it 
with a new insight and a new courage. Then 
and there she vowed to tell the old tale in 
her own way, humbly but without fear, 
letting it come just as it would choose to 
come. On her return to the little city in 
southern Sweden where she was teaching 
school she sketched out three chapters in 
so many nights, "the pages filling them- 
selves with a quickness that she had never 
dreamt of." After that the week-day cares 
of her profession closed in upon her again, 
and again a long time passed without much 
being done, the one difference being that 



148 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

now she knew both what she had to do and 
the way of doing it. 

But at last her saga was drawing near 
its triumphant climax. A Swedish period- 
ical offered a big prize for the best original 
novel of a hundred pages. Eight days be- 
fore the closing of the contest Miss Lagerlof 
decided to try for the prize with five of the 
chapters she had already sketched out. Two 
of these had assumed a form that made 
them immediately available, but the other 
three had to be practically written anew. 
At that time she was visiting the home of 
one of her sisters in the very heart of the 
region where the tales of the cavaliers had 
sprung into life. The night before the day 
when the manuscript must be mailed she had 
to attend a party. This was held in the 
very manor where had once lived the evil 
genius of the cavaliers, that old Sintram 
who had made a pact with the Evil One 
and who used to be seen travelling home- 
ward at night after two black fire-breathing 
bulls. In that legend-haunted house Miss 



SELMA LAGERLOF 149 

Lagerlof wrote the last twenty pages, sitting 
up all night after the party had come to 
an end. 

The rest seems almost dull in comparison 
with what has been told so far. She was 
awarded the prize, as we all know — and 
this, although the work she submitted was 
merely a torso. To complete it became then 
an imperative necessity, and friends ar- 
ranged things so that she could take a year's 
leave of absence for that purpose. And 
in 1891 "Gosta Berling's Saga" reached the 
public in the shape with which we are now 
familiar. 

Once she had begun to write in earnest, 
she simply had to keep on. More Warm- 
land tales rose out of her memory demand- 
ing to be told. Volume after volume grew 
out of her busy pen. In some ways they 
were not as good as the first one; in other 
ways they were even better. That initial 
spontaneity which gave to "Gosta Berling's 
Saga" a niche all by itself had been spent 
and could never be recovered. In its place 



150 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

came artistic restraint and sense of propor- 
tion in growing degrees. And on the whole, 
it might be said that each new book showed 
definite signs of advance. 

After a while she left her teacher's posi- 
tion to give herself undividedly to writing. 
The late King Oscar and his youngest son, 
the "painter-prince," Eugene, befriended 
her and enabled her to realize her long 
cherished desire of seeing foreign lands and 
peoples. She won more and more admirers 
among small and great, among rich and 
poor. She bought back her beloved Mar- 
backa with the money her pen had earned. 
And — what mattered more than anything 
else to herself, perhaps — new tales began to 
reach her, tales having their roots in that 
vast foreign world of which she had dreamed 
when she tried to borrow heroes from 
Walter Scott and the Arabian Nights. 
Thus she wrote "The Miracles of Anti- 
christ," which is laid in Sicily, and 
"Jesusalem," which begins in the Swedish 
province of Dalecarlia, her own winter 



SELMA LAGERLOF 151 

home for many years, and ends in Palestine. 
The first part of the latter work proved a 
tale even greater than that which she had 
woven around the wayward figure of Gosta 
Berling. Its first and final chapters are 
counted among the finest things our latter- 
day literature has to offer. 

Long before this second masterpiece of 
hers placed her fame on a solid basis, it 
had spread to other countries than her own, 
and as a rule she was received as one carry- 
ing precious gifts. Not so in this country, 
however, when her three first volumes were 
brought out here. A few knowing ones 
read and gave thanks and passed on the 
good word: that once more it had pleased 
the gods of song and saga to bless the earth 
with a true poet. But the mass remained 
indifferent. Soon copies of those three 
volumes might be had for a few cents from 
among the deadwood littering the stalls out- 
side the second-hand bookstores, which is 
the customary sign of commercial failure 
in the land cf letters. When "Jerusalem" 



152 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

was ready, the firm that had already ob- 
tained the American rights deemed it wiser 
not to make use of them. And so it hap- 
pens that, even when I am writing this, 
American readers remain unable to reach 
the book which many lovers of Miss Lager- 
lof's art consider her greatest. 

But nevertheless she was to conquer here 
also. Another firm risked the publication 
of that group of short stories to which she 
has given the name of "Christ Legends." 
These charming tales, at once so quaintly 
unreal and so startlingly real, so daringly 
familiar and so profoundly reverent, took 
the fancy of our public as decisively as the 
previous ones had failed to do. Finally 
came the book that more than any other 
one has made friends for her in this coun- 
try— "The Adventures of Nils," both 
volumes of which have been charmingly 
translated by Mrs. Velma Swanston How- 
ard. It is a book for children — the story 
of a little boy's wonderful journey through 
his native country and its history — but I 



SELMA LAGERLOF 153 

hare not yet found the grown-up reader 
of it who was unwilling to be counted a 
child again while the reading of it lasted. 
Thanks to this work, and also to the volume 
of short stories named "The Girl from the 
Marsh Croft," out of which I have taken 
most of the details used in re-telling Miss 
Lagerlof's own story, you may now look 
long and hard for a cheap copy of "Gosta 
Berling's Saga," or "Invisible Links," or 
"The Miracles of Antichrist," for they have 
all, long ago, been snapped up and read. 



THE NEW MYSTICISM 



Its Prophet: Francis Grierson 

"Ti .TEN of genius," says Francis Grier- 
!>▼ JL son, "are the symbols and the 
finger-points which nature unfolds here and 
there as indications of the mathematical and 
psychic progression of the visible and in- 
visible world in which we live." 

But that evolutionary process which we 
call progress presents itself to me every- 
where as a pendular swinging between op- 
posites lying now in this, now in that direc- 
tion. In our efforts to determine the 
momentary direction of those swingings, we 
select, more or less arbitrarily, certain points 
deriving their significance from tendencies 
common to all life. Thus, for instance, we 
find it hard to indicate any kind of spiritual 

154 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 155 

advance without reference to what we gen- 
erally name "scepticism" and "mysticism" 
— principles back of which we discover fun- 
damental attitudes of the human mind. 

Surveyed from the antipodal position, 
scepticism appears little more than carping 
doubt, while mysticism, similarly viewed, 
implies blind faith and poor thinking. Re- 
garded in this hostile spirit, both attitudes 
seem like pure negations of progress. Very 
differently they appear, indeed, if we study 
them from within, so to speak, and in 
proper coordination with life in its entirety. 
Then scepticism is seen to stand for a de- 
mand that nothing be accepted as real 
which cannot be tested and re-tested by our 
senses supported by such artificial aids as 
our growing ingenuity enables us to devise. 
And mysticism becomes then identified with 
an insistence on the supreme importance of 
realities so subtle that they lie beyond any- 
thing ascertainable by mere sense percep- 
tion. 

As far back as we have records of sys- 



156 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

tematic thinking, we find the human mind 
swinging periodically between these antago- 
nistic attitudes, the inference being that 
neither one of them represents the full 
truth, but only a part of the truth which 
needs temporary accentuation if life's on- 
ward course along the median line is to be 
maintained. We may add that the sceptical 
view, as a rule, draws its main inspiration 
from the intellect, while mysticism places 
the greater emphasis on the emotional side 
of our being. 

The flowering time of classic antiquity 
was, on the whole, sceptical and intellectual. 
Christianity inaugurated an era of highly 
emotional mysticism that lasted up to and 
beyond the dawn of the Renaissance. With 
the beginning of what we call "modern" 
times, the sway passed to reason, and up 
to the eve of the French Revolution man's 
spirit continued to grow more and more 
dryly sceptical. The nearer we come to our 
own day, the shorter and quicker grow the 
swingings of the pendulum. The emo- 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 157 

tional period named the Romantic Era 
lasted less than a century before it yielded 
to another intellectual reaction, and this, 
again, showed signs of waning within a 
few decades. The characteristic mark of 
this most recent period of scepticism was 
that it discouraged any venturing beyond 
that central field of obvious existence on 
which falls the full light of our self -con- 
sciousness. And our main reasons for feel- 
ing that our faces are once more set toward 
the mystical pole lie in the eagerness with 
which we are now shedding our former 
agnostic timidity, and in the growing ten- 
dency to spend at least a small part of our- 
selves in those marginal tracts of being upon 
which falls the shadow of the unknowable. 

When, in 1886, Ibsen published "Ros- 
mersholm," the end of naturalism in litera- 
ture and of materialism in philosophy was 
already in sight. Three years later a single 
twelvemonth encompassed three outwardly 
unrelated events, each one of which must 
be held momentous in the annals of the 



158 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

present spiritual phase. In 1889 Maeter- 
linck published his first play, "Princess 
Maleine." In 1889 Bergson sent forth his 
first great philosophical work, which has 
only recently become familiar in this coun- 
try under its English title of "Time and 
Free Will." And in that same year a tiny 
volume of essays and aphorisms in French 
was printed privately at Paris by Francis 
Grierson under the name of "La Revolte 
Idealiste." 

Within certain circles that little volume 
was hailed as a revelation and a battle cry. 
Maeterlinck read it and expressed his ad- 
miration openly. The general public heard 
no more of it than of Bergson's coeval 
work. Of course, the early plays of Maeter- 
linck warned many of an impending change. 
And in each new drama turned out by 
Ibsen toward the end of his life, the mystical 
tendency asserted itself more strongly. But 
I think that the first book which made the 
beginning of a new period palpably evident 
was "The Treasure of the Humble," ap- 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 159 

pearing in 1896. In the same year Bergson 
published his second volume, named "Matter 
and Memory." And three years later 
Grierson issued his first book in English — 
a group of essays bearing the significant 
title of "Modern Mysticism" and including 
much of what had already been printed in 
the earlier French volume. 

Life has a way of making many tools 
work as one, while each of them thinks it- 
self alone "on the job." This is practically 
what happened to the three men in whom 
I am inclined to see living pillars of 
the thought-structure most expressive of 
our own day and its tendencies. Each one 
of them may owe something to the other 
two, and yet all of them were from the 
start impelled by a common spirit and 
would probably in the end have reached a 
clear understanding of this spirit without 
mutual assistance. Maeterlinck has proved 
himself more of an artist than Grierson, 
and Bergson more of a thinker. The for- 
mulations of both Maeterlinck and Bergson 



160 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

are more definite in outline than those of 
Grierson. But to Grierson belongs the 
honor of having first attained to prophetic 
vision of the common goal. For that hum- 
ble volume of 1889 suggested more or less 
gropingly every idea which since then has 
become recognized as essential, not only to 
Maeterlinck and Bergson, but to the con- 
stantly increasing number of writers who 
are now engaged in making the time con- 
scious of its own spirit. And it is as one 
of nature's "finger-points" — the first one of 
its kind to bear a fairly plain inscription — 
that Grierson interests me. 

His position in the van of modern thought 
is the more remarkable because he began 
life as a musician, and under circumstances 
that, at first glance, would seem decidedly 
unfavorable to his later literary develop- 
ment. It is doubtful, however, whether he 
could ever have become what we now see 
in him without just the kind of experience 
that filled his earlier years. Born at 
Birkenhead, England, in 1848, he was over 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 161 

fortv when he issued his first book, and 
over fifty when he began to gain wide- 
spread recognition as a writer. In connec- 
tion with his strongly individualistic attitude 
and his impatient scorn of what he calls 
"provincialism," it is interesting to note that 
one of his ancestors was that Sir Robert 
Grierson, fourteenth Land of Lagg, who 
figures so conspicuously in Scott's "Red- 
gauntlet." 

When the boy was only a year old, his 
parents emigrated to this county. After 
several westward moves, the family settled 
at last in the prairie country of southern 
Illinois, where abolitionism was then assum- 
ing its first practical expression through the 
"underground railway," and where a little 
later Lincoln began his struggle for national 
leadership. The time was already big with 
the coming crisis. Men's minds were 
strangely restless and expectant. A wave 
of mingled religious and political emotion 
was sweeping the country. The old 
prophecies were chanted with a new mean- 



162 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ing. When not wholly overlooked, the little 
everyday things became symbolical of life- 
embracing truths. And as in most periods 
of great tension, the people shunned the 
sceptical spirit ordinarily glorified under 
the name of "common sense." 

That earliest environment stamped itself 
on the supersensitive boy for life. The 
wind-swept vastness of the prairie filled his 
soul with a wonder that is still stirring 
mightily within the man of sixty-five. He 
attended some of those cyclonic revivals that 
prostrated whole counties in common awe 
and faith. He watched the mysterious ar- 
rivals and departures of frightened, chatter- 
ing fugitives. He heard Lincoln and 
Douglas debate, and, a mere boy, he even 
took a minor part in the tumult that ensued 
when at last the pent-up passions of in- 
compatible civilizations clashed openly. 

Through all those disturbing impressions 
flowed influences of a more intimate char- 
acter that, fortunately, made for mental 
poise and a calm faith in the powers within. 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 163 

Like shining, winged guardians, the mem- 
ories of his father's quiet nobility and his 
mother's patient kindliness have always re- 
mained with him, making him kind and 
considerate toward everybody, patient and 
dignified in the face of everything. Nor 
is he able to hark back to a moment when 
everything that was most himself did not 
leap in mysterious response to the sound 
of his mother's voice — a voice peculiarly 
sonorous and sweet even when she spoke, 
but trembling with almost unearthly har- 
monies when she raised it in song. From 
his mother must have emanated the gift 
which later brought him an all but unique 
place in the world of music. 

In 1863 the family moved east again. 
And in 1868 Grierson was at Washington, 
meeting Walt Whitman and practicing the 
art peculiarly his own. I don't know when 
or how he discovered his ability to improvise 
on the piano a music always comparable to, 
and sometimes surpassing, the best com- 
posed in the ordinary manner. All I know 



164 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

is that when, in 1869, he made his Euro- 
pean debut at Paris, he won the startled 
approbation of the most critical audiences 
in the world. And for years that tall boy 
of Byronic appearance, who could not even 
read music from the sheet, and who seems 
to have had little or no systematic instruc- 
tion, went triumphantly from country to 
country, gaining everywhere the hearing 
and favor of the great ones, whether 
crowned or laurelled. To this day Grier- 
son's command of the piano remains as per- 
fect and as inexplicable as ever. 

Persons of sound judgment, who have 
heard him, say that his playing has an in- 
describable quality, found in none that is 
studied from the sheet and developed by 
practice. It is as if his soul were able to 
impress its every mood and fancy directly 
on the keyboard, drawing from it a music 
at once spontaneous and subtly expressive 
as that of wind and water, of reeds and 
trees. It is a music mirroring the strife and 
the prayer that accompany the human soul's 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 165 

struggle to solve both its own riddle and 
that of the encompassing universe. From 
the power speaking through this music 
Grierson may have derived the passion for 
spontaneous utterance and the unquestioned 
reliance on intuitive guidance which assert 
themselves so conspicuously in all his writ- 
ings. 

For many years Grierson moved hither 
and thither as the impulse of the moment 
prompted him. At times he took great 
risks, and at times he suffered hardships 
in consequence thereof. Mostly fate pro- 
vided mysteriously for him wherever he 
went, causing him to believe that, for the 
right man at least, the thing he needs is 
always waiting. Frequently he found him- 
self in company that might have proved 
dangerous to a mind less firmly fixed in 
its own spirit. It cannot be denied that 
he speaks eagerly, and at times a little 
egotistically, of his acquaintance with men 
and women in exalted positions. But, as 
a rule, he has always kept his head firm 



166 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

and his vision clear. And there is an un- 
mistakable ring of truth in his words when 
he says that he has never yet seen the palace 
in which he cared to live. Concrete hu- 
manity has with him largely taken the place 
of books, "the idea of knowing the world 
from books having never entered his head." 
Yet he has read extensively, to good pur- 
pose, and only of what has a claim to serious 
attention. Now and then his critical judg- 
ments are peculiar or intolerant ; in the main 
they are scrupulously just and eloquent of 
his familiarity with the best literatures of 
all ages. 

Of the circumstances that first led him to 
write I know no more than of his first 
venture into music. As early as 1882 he 
delivered some discourses on "Materialism 
in Germany" and "The Influence of Mod- 
ern Literature from a Spiritual Stand- 
point," which were published — but when 
and how I cannot tell. The essays and 
aphorisms forming his first volume he seems 
to have produced for his own pleasure alone 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 167 

and with no thought of giving them to the 
public. This he did only with hesitation 
and at the urgent requests of his friend, L. 
Waldemar Tonner, who has been his con- 
stant companion for more than twenty-five 
years. The reception given that initial 
volume was, as I have already mentioned, 
flattering enough as far as it went, but it 
did very little to bring its author before 
the general public. The main thing it did 
for him was to reveal his true field of en- 
deavor. 

It seems likely that Grierson was not un- 
mindful of his own case when he wrote that 
"all men and women are heroic who have 
worked, waited and suffered without losing 
faith in themselves." He has always been 
a master in the art of waiting, and his faith 
in the ultimate success of his work seems 
never to have wavered. Ten years passed 
before he produced his second book, in 
English, and even then it was largely made 
up of what had already entered into the 
previous volume. It was that book of essays 



168 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

named "Modern Mysticism," which still 
may be counted Grierson's chief personal 
message to mankind. Two years later, in 
1901, he published another group of essays 
and reflections under the title of "The Celtic 
Temperament." Both these works aroused 
a great deal of attention in England, and 
had he continued without interruption to 
produce books of the same kind, his reputa- 
tion might have spread more rapidly among 
the public at large. 

Instead he took up a long-cherished 
project of giving artistic form to his child- 
hood reminiscences of Lincoln's time and 
country. It was a work of love on which 
he spent eight years and all his savings. 
He named the book "The Valley of 
Shadows" when it appeared in 1909. It 
is in every way a remarkable production, 
not known as it deserves on this side of 
the ocean. It is the one work of Grierson's 
in which the form equals the contents and 
the spirit in importance. Perfection cannot 
be claimed for it. As much of what has 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 169 

sprung from Grierson's pen, it is weak in 
design, containing whole chapters not ger- 
mane to its purpose. But it makes us live 
once more in the pltysical and spiritual at- 
mosphere of its chosen time and place. Its 
pages haunt us with their strange mingling 
of exquisite art and artless simplicity. To 
read that book and remain the same man 
as before seems out of the question. Judg- 
ing it as a piece of art, this work ranks 
far ahead of anything else Grierson has 
done hitherto. Nevertheless I shall not 
recur to it again because, after all, I do 
not think it bears the same vital relation 
to the spirit and outlook of the time as do 
his essays. 

Since the appearance of "The Valley of 
Shadows," Grierson has given us a volume 
of reminiscent essays named "Parisian Por- 
traits," another volume of literary and 
philosophical essays called "The Humor of 
the Underman," and a volume of essays 
and aphorisms in French, "La Vie et les 
Hommes," These later works offer few 



170 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ideas not present in the earlier ones, but 
they are valuable for the additional light 
they throw on Grierson's life view, besides 
being richly endowed with the charm at- 
taching to all he has written. 

Even at this late date Grierson remains, 
on the whole, a "writer's writer" — one ap- 
pealing to the few rather than to the many. 
To this exclusiveness he would be the last 
one to raise any objection, for toward the 
mass of men his attitude has always been a 
little impatient, and it is difficult for him to 
approach life except from the viewpoint 
which Tarde designated as the "inventor's." 
In spite of this reserve inherent in his work, 
something like a Grierson cult has, during 
the last few years, begun to gather ad- 
herents on both sides of the ocean. This 
I mention merely as evidence of the close 
connection between Grierson's thought and 
the tendencies by which the race-mind is 
most affected for the moment. 

It is with the spirit rather than the form 
of Grierson's work I am concerned in this 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 171 

study. Yet his form is not a negligible 
factor if we want to arrive at a correct 
estimate of his achievement. He himself 
is a worshipper of beauty in all its embodi- 
ments, and his conception of the part it 
pla}^s in the general scheme of life is sug- 
gested by his saj r ing that, "as a dance with- 
out harmonious movement has no charm, so 
an idea without style has no force." His 
style is often exquisite and always effective. 
In his striving after perfect form, however, 
he is more English than French, paying 
more attention to expression than to design, 
which seems strange in one who places such 
stress on brevity and directness, and who 
has given us what almost amounts to a new 
literary category, standing between the 
essay and the aphorism. 

His thoughts leap rather than flow, and 
at times he passes from one to another with 
an abruptness that both startles and puzzles 
the reader. The same abruptness seems 
characteristic of most writers who are what 
might be called intellectually self-made. It 



172 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

implies at bottom a contempt for those 
smooth commonplaces which we are so 
prone to use in passing from one link to 
another in our chain of argument. What, 
on the other hand, may justly be deemed 
a defect lies in the tendency of Grierson to 
lapse into hopeless confusion whenever he 
attempts a categorical subdivision of any 
general group of phenomena. Then, more 
than at any other time, he proves himself a 
writer and thinker to whom rigid classifica- 
tion and systematization are essentially 
foreign. 

Whoever sees in pigeon-holed compre- 
hensiveness the chief desideratum had better 
not seek it in Grierson's pages. There he 
will find no logically arranged system, no 
creed neatly done up in "fourthlies" 
and "fifthlies," while ever so often he 
will discover indisputable evidences of 
self-contradiction. But Grierson neither 
is nor pretends to be a philosopher in 
the academic sense. He has as much 
passion as Bergson, if not more, for keep- 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 173 

ing his conception of life fluid. And he 
writes, not for pedants, but for brave and 
tolerant temperaments, ready to forgive 
verbal inconsistencies if only the spirit be 
consistent, and eager to use the ideas offered 
them as bricks for the upbuilding of their 
own systems. If approached in the right 
way, he will always be found suggestive, 
though never exhaustive in any sense. Pur- 
posely obscure he is not, but sometimes his 
thoughts are a little too far-reaching for 
the ordinary run of words, and therefrom 
results a certain vagueness calling for 
sympathetic cooperation on the part of the 
reader. And of one thing such a reader 
may always be sure: that back of every 
blurred passage will be felt the pressure of 
mystic meanings, heralding what to later 
generations may appear as plain, familiar 
truths. 

Of course, it is inevitable that one who 
has brooded so insistently on all the riddles 
that make up our existence, as well as on 
some that seem to reach beyond it, must 



174 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

have arrived at certain formulations that 
meet us with an air of conclusiveness. But 
interesting as these may be in themselves, 
they are not what makes Grierson's work 
valuable to us. The basis of that value lies 
in something much subtler, something al- 
most defying our efforts at definition. 
More than anything else it resembles a 
mood, an attitude, but one so consistent and 
so enduring that it constitutes the equivalent 
of a logical life interpretation. It is as if 
Grierson felt rather than saw what life 
implies in its utmost ramifications and con- 
sequences, and as if, from this feeling 
amounting almost to vision, he had derived 
a golden rule as to the way life should 
be lived under any and every circum- 
stance. 

Of this attitude he is wont to speak in 
certain constantly recurring terms, which 
vary with the point of approach. When 
he deals with valuations of life, he is likely 
to use words like "pessimism" and "disillu- 
sionment." When, again, he considers the 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 175 

methods of effective living, he employs such 
terms as "intuition," "imagination," and 
"inspiration." With his pessimism we need 
not concern ourselves at length. Its quality 
is provokingly evasive, and Grierson's 
meaning might be equally clear if he used 
the antithetical term of optimism. He 
does, in fact, play ball with those two terms, 
choosing now one and now the other to 
represent the same thing, or making one of 
them by turns express quite different things. 
But what he is really aiming at one rarely 
fails to catch. In the end it amounts to 
this: that he sees life as a striving and not 
as a holding — as a journey and not as an 
arrival. To him the fatuous optimism of 
the early eighteenth century, for instance, 
means nothing but a belief that some day 
life will reach a final equilibrium ; while that 
"modern melancholy," with its "natural 
gesture of disillusionment," to which he 
sometimes refers as "practical pessimism," 
means a realization, on the part both of the 
individual and the race, that eternal dis- 



176 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

harmony is the price which must be paid 
for eternal progress. 

"Men are potent and persevering from, 
fear of the future," he says, "and never from 
an absolute confidence in it." With despair 
or resigned inactivity, with all the repellent 1 
features of that surrender which makes for 
decadence in art as in life, his peculiar 
brand of pessimism has absolutely nothing 
in common. Of such decadent, life-destroy- 
ing pessimism he says that those given to 
it "take the trivial and fleeting things of 
life as if they were intended to remain as 
perpetual realities instead of passing inci- 
dents." Perhaps his own feeling in this 
matter comes nearest authentic manifesta- 

r~ _ 

tion in a passage where he says that "in 
everything development mounts upward by 
regular stages, the last expression in the 
ladder of progress being the most favorable, 
but never final." This is modern, vitalistic 
evolutionism, with its placing of perfec- 
tional striving, not achieved perfection, at 
the heart of life. And it is in thorough 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 177 

keeping with the spirit common to men like 
Ostwald and Mach, Bergson and Cope, that 
Grierson adds: "For we shall not reach 
finality till the last flicker of hope goes out 
on the shores of Silence and Eternity." 

But still nearer to Grierson's life concep- 
tion do we come when we turn to that other 
set of terms which he is wont to use — the 
terms indicative of what to him appears 
the proper method of dealing with life's 
problems. And it follows, of course, from 
what was said above, that to him life pri- 
marily must present itself as an endless 
series of problems demanding solution. 
Both his preoccupation with methods of 
living and his instinctive clinging to the 
aphoristic form in writing as well as think- 
ing, confirms our impression of him as a 
preacher and prophet rather than philoso- 
pher — one more anxious to tell us how to 
live than what life is. What he wants to 
give and has to give in richest measure 
may be expressed in a single word : wisdom. 
As we read essay after essay, it is as if we 



178 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

beheld the globe of life revolving slowly be- 
tween us and some unknown source of light, 
the rays of which lend an edge of trans- 
parency to the core of opaqueness. 

Grierson's books fall naturally into the 
class of "Ecclesiastes," for which he has 
such fondness; and it is only logical that 
he should judge the worth of an author by 
the number of life-enlightening phrases to 
be culled from his work. The wisdom that 
finds expression in his own pithy and 
polished phrases has a quaint streak of 
worldly shrewdness running through its es- 
sential unworldliness, showing that wher- 
ever his head be, his feet are always on 
firm ground. This element of homely com- 
mon sense may have been acquired while he 
received the intoxicating homage reserved 
for a musical prodigy, or it may be tracea- 
ble to his impressions of those canny Illinois 
settlers, who retained a certain balance even 
in the midst of religious excesses. No 
matter where he got it, we may be glad he 
does possess it, for just this mixture of two 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 179 

widely different kinds of wisdom tends to 
give his mysticism the quality which ren- 
ders it suitable to the mood of our own day. 
Too often in the past mysticism has 
prided itself on being fantastic and imprac- 
tical. Too often it has stood wholly hostile 
to that light of "cold reason" which Blake 
declared to be "the only enemy of God." 
But we of to-day feel differently, and we 
are not willing to sacrifice what the pains- 
taking intellectual labors of the last few 
centuries have gained for us. We want to 
arrive at a more correct estimate of the 
power and scope of our intellectual faculty, 
but we do not wish to abolish it — supposing 
this to be possible. What we aim at is a 
blending of emotion and intellect from 
which will spring a still higher faculty, 
capable of reaching closer to life's utmost 
confines and innermost recesses than either 
one of its constituent parts. It is because 
this desire of ours is so completely Grier- 
son's that he takes such eminent rank among 
those who are now leading mankind on to 



180 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

a never before attained degree of self-con- 
sciousness. 

For however strenuously he may harp on 
the saving grace of that quality which, by 
turns, he speaks of as intuition, imagina- 
tion and inspiration, he maintains no less 
strenuously that this voice out of our sub- 
conscious depths must be checked by scien- 
tific interpretation. In other words, it is 
some synthesis like the one just indicated, 
and not another form of onesidedness, for 
which he pleads. He has said, I admit, that 
"the longer he lives, the less he esteems 
work that is purely intellectual." But he 
has also said that "the world is not governed 
by what bodies of people do or say, but by 
ideas." And, although he asserts that "pro- 
found feeling is one of the principal in- 
gredients of genius," he has made clear in 
numerous passages that sentimentalism and 
unbridled emotionalism are as foreign to 
him as occultism and any kind of super- 
naturalism. 

When he tells us to heed the voice of 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 181 

intuition, or insists that "imagination is the 
basic pillar of science as well as romance," 
he wants us to turn our vision inward and 
not backward. He wants us not to abandon 
our search for truth, but to search for it in 
a direction long neglected and discredited. 
It is one of the chief traits of our own day 
that it has begun to grasp the part played 
by emotion in our dealings with the hard 
task of comprehending life. And to this 
grasp our present mystical trend must be 
largely traced. We are beginning to see 
that our intellectual consciousness, from 
which springs scepticism and its entire 
groundwork of inductive reasoning, always 
tends to run into a sharp point and end 
there. All such consciousness may be 
likened to an angle turned upward: beyond 
its apex there is nothing. Mysticism, on 
the other hand, and also deductive reason- 
ing, may be represented by an angle stand- 
ing on its apex and opening outward until 
all life may be included within its embrace. 
Each one of those conscious forms has its 



182 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

warrant and its use. What we want is to 
combine them — to join those two angles so 
that where they meet we get a focal point 
toward which converges all the past, all 
reality that has already been conquered, and 
from which diverges the whole future with 
its infinity of still unmeasured realities. 

To me emotion is a general reaction of 
the whole system, that juxtaposes itself, on 
one side, to the peripheral reactions of the 
senses, and on the other, to the centralized 
reactions of the brain. Instinct is emotion 
turning into action without interference of 
the reason. Intuition, according to Berg- 
son, is instinct grown self-conscious. And 
imagination, as I see it, is intellect impelled 
by intuition — or, if it please you better, 
plunged into the deep recesses of subcon- 
scious being and thus brought into more 
direct communication with that source of life 
which is also the ultimate source of all 
knowledge. 

Mysticism has always demanded a plunge 
of some such kind, but the distinguishing 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 183 

mark of our new mysticism is that the 
plunge stands neither for an end in itself 
nor for a negation of the ordinary modes 
and objects of consciousness. The mystic 
of to-day does not dream of extinguishing 
the searchlight of self-consciousness. He 
wishes only to reverse it, in order that by 
its light he may explore the world within 
and thus attain to new sympathy and new 
understanding for the world without. He 
is not renouncing knowledge based on the 
testimony of the senses and the judgment 
of the brain: he is instead trying to supple- 
ment it with knowledge reached by new 
routes. These routes have too long been 
rejected by the spirit of scepticism, of 
mechanical rationalism, of one-sided ma- 
terialism, that was needed to teach us once 
for all what is knowledge and what is not. 
To the new mystic — as we find him em- 
bodied in Grierson, for instance — the heart 
has its own wireless system, and this he 
wants us to study with all the keenness of 
which the head is capable, so that thereby 



184 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the hand may gain added precision in its 
moulding of what Ibsen called "the third 
kingdom" and Grierson somewhere speaks 
of as "the precincts of perpetual magic." 

As seen by Grierson, the world is full of 
mysterious coincidences, of secretly ordained 
and regulated happenings, of signs and 
symbols with almost cabalistic portent. But 
these manifestations of a world not yet 
subdued by our senses imply nothing occult, 
nothing that may not be held strictly 
"natural." Beneath the perishable surface 
he spies an imperishable and immanent life 
principle, to which he may or may not give 
the name of God, as the mood of the moment 
happens to connect his dreams with the past 
or with the future. His creed, largely un- 
formulated, is at bottom nothing but that 
ancient pantheism, that primal glimmer of 
truth, which has haunted man's mind ever 
since he began to make gods in his own 
image, and which will continue to haunt him 
until he surrenders to its wise promptings 
and recognizes the whole world and all life 



FRANCIS GRIERSON 185 

as divine. With this in mind, Grierson 
defines our own epoch, the twentieth cen- 
tuiy, as the one in which "science is at last 
to coalesce with the pantheistic idea of the 
Greeks." Science must be there as one of 
the fusing principles; it stands for reason, 
for the scepticism of the test tube and the 
scales. But reason is no longer to be the 
sole witness bearing testimony : beside it will 
be heard intuition — the voice of life itself 
rising through our emotions into the steady, 
dispassionate light of the intellect. 



II 

Its Poet: Maurice Maeterlinck 

WHEN, in 1911, it became known that 
the Belgian poet-philosopher had 
been awarded the Nobel prize for literature, 
none of the usual clamorous dissent was 
heard — nothing, in fact, but pleased ap- 
proval. Back of this rare accord between 
the much-criticized Swedish Academy and 
an irreverent world might lie nothing but 
admiration granted by our reasons to one 
who has moulded the unborn thoughts of his 
time into lucid and melodious words. But 
I am inclined to seek for a more potent ex- 
planation, and to find it in a feeling sc 
strong and intimate that it can be described 
only as love. And this much, it seems to 

me, is universally given to Maeterlinck, not 
186 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 187 

as a poet and thinker alone, but as a per- 
sonality — as a beacon soul, at once pure and 
strong, wise and sweet, toward which our 
hearts instinctively turn in their search for 
consolation and inspiration. 

There was a time, not so very long ago, 
when, to use James Huneker's striking 
phrase, "Maeterlinck meant for most people 
a crazy crow masquerading in tail feathers 
plucked from the Swan of Avon." As he 
stands before us to-day, modern literature 
knows of few more commanding figures, 
and of none more charming. Springing 
from a small country, his genius has turned 
the whole civilized world into a fatherland 
claiming him for its own. Writing minia- 
ture plays for puppet stages, he has taken 
his place beside Ibsen and Strindberg as 
a reformer of the modern theatre. Seeking 
for a form that would fit his dreams even 
more perfectly than his own "formless" 
dramas, he has raised the philosophical 
essay to a height attained only by Emerson 
among latter-day writers. Though work- 



188 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

ing only for truth and the joy of working, 
his efforts have also earned worldly returns, 
enabling him to make a home of an old 
Benedictine abbey, where Madame Maeter- 
linck, who on the stage is Georgette Le- 
blanc, can find ideal settings for "Macbeth" 
and "Pelleas and Melisande." That such 
a man should, as rumor asserts, refuse to 
surrender his Belgian citizenship in order 
to become a member of the French Acad- 
emy seems too consistent with his character 
not to be true. 

The charm of this man, who has given us 
such masterpieces of soul-penetration as 
"Aglavaine and Selysette" or "Wisdom and 
Destiny," is rendered doubly striking by a 
physical ruggedness and balance that fur- 
nish a background of unexpectedness to the 
subtlety of his speculation and the delicacy 
of his artistic form. Tall and active, large 
of limb and rather heavy featured, he is 
more at home out of doors than in the 
study. Sweeping along the highroads in 
an automobile driven by himself, or skim- 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 189 

ming the frozen surface of some canal in 
his native country, he appears most himself. 
Yet there is much both in his appearance 
and his habits that helps to account for that 
gentle calm which strikes us as the dominant 
spirit of his work even when he deals with 
the heart's most stirring tragedies. Hav- 
ing only the tone of his poetry in mind, 
Arthur Symons said once that "he speaks 
always without raising his voice." But that 
saying holds true of the whole man and all 
that he is and does. 

Seldom has the world known a soul so 
well poised, so at peace with whatever fate 
might choose to bring, so disregardful of the 
petty concerns that keep most human lives 
in a state of turmoil. All polite conven- 
tionalities are hateful to him, and yet he 
would never dream of striving consciously 
at any sort of unconventionality. It seems 
just as natural for him to be himself as 
this requires effort in ordinary persons. 
And when thus surrendering to the quiet 
pressure from within, he cannot but shun 



190 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the bustle and hustle, the strife and the 
shamming, of mart and of drawing room. 

Next to his unostentatious strength and 
unfeigned equanimity, the man's most char- 
acteristic trait is a shy reserve, behind which 
lies an almost complete lack of personal 
vanity, and not, as sometimes happens, a 
pride so overweening that it dares not ex- 
pose itself to any rebuff. If caught at the 
right time and place, he will talk most fas- 
cinatingly — about practically anything but 
himself. But silence is more natural to him 
than talk, solitude more dear than company. 
There is in him a craving to dream and to 
brood that must have got into his very blood 
out of the mist-laden atmosphere of his 
native shores. But whenever he does speak 
— or write — his every expression proves the 
truth of Alfred Sutro's declaration that, 
"if the word mystic implies anything of 
mental fog or obscurity, then Maeterlinck 
is none." 

He springs from Flemish stock that has 
been settled for something like six centuries 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 191 

in or about Ghent, where he was born in 
1862. His childhood was spent in a home 
where, as in some of his own plays, ships 
could be seen sailing through what looked 
to be the back part of the garden. The 
country and its population of slow, taciturn 
peasantry seem to have impressed them- 
selves with equal force on the boy. And 
to this day his work takes much of its domi- 
nant coloring from the closely allied tempers 
of Belgian nature and Belgian people. 

Seven years of precious youth were spent 
in a Jesuit college under a discipline that he 
himself has described as tyrannical. And 
yet I cannot recall a single protest in his 
art evoked by that significant experience. 
Here as elsewhere he looks kindly to the 
past and the institutions that once served 
it well, while all the eagerness of his spirit 
goes out to the future and what it may 
bring of higher perfection, higher happiness. 

In that college, and later at the university, 
he met several men of his own kind — men 
like Charles van Lerberghe and Emile 



192 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Verhaeren, whose names hardly mean any- 
thing in English-speaking countries, though 
they have given Belgium a noted place in 
present-day literature. He studied law and 
was admitted to the bar. He even practiced 
a little and lost a case or two. This failure 
was ascribed to his low and rather thin voice, 
which lends itself but poorly to emphatic 
expression. But I suspect that it depended 
as much on his ability to see both sides of 
every case. He, who has spoken of our 
tendency to believe in a universal justice 
as "the prejudice which has its roots deepest 
in our hearts," cannot have failed, from the 
very start, to perceive how the elusive thing 
we call "right" refuses to stay undivided 
with any one person or cause. 

At twenty-four he went to Paris — to the 
place where, if we may believe Alfred 
Sutro, "art is more than a word, more than 
a cult — a brotherhood." From the first 
Maeterlinck was received as a member of 
that brotherhood by the grace of God. The 
air was then full of a sort of symbolism that 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 193 

endeavored to express by the innate melody 
of words what might be too elusive for their 
meaning. And } r oung Maeterlinck wrote 
poems as hauntingly incomprehensible as 
any of the rest. 

Then he published his first play, "Princess 
Maleine," and Octave Mirbeau proclaimed 
him "greater than Shakespeare." Most 
men would have lost their heads over the 
ill-worded praise, or their hearts over the 
ridicule it provoked. Nothing illustrates 
his wonderful mental equilibrium better 
than his calm disregard of both applause 
and laughter. And it was not long before 
other plays followed — of a quaintness and 
a daintiness such as the world had never 
seen before — and with each of them his fame 
waxed and spread. 

What his financial position may have been 
in those early days I have not been able to 
discover. But he must have had some 
private means that enabled him to pursue 
his course without regard to anything but 
his own faith in it. And so he has con- 



194. VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

tinued to do ever since — ''loving what he 
wrote, and writing only what he loved." 
Now the day is gone when the authenticity 
of his genius might be seriously questioned. 
Probably nothing has done more to settle 
that question than his fairy play, "The 
Blue Bird," by which he succeeded in ap- 
pealing to the many as formerly he had 
appealed to the few. They tell me that at 
one time this play was given by fifty-nine 
different companies in Russia alone. Be 
that as it maj^, there is now no civilized lan- 
guage into which his works have not been 
transplanted. Nor is there a nook so hidden 
in any part of the Western world that it is 
not likely to hold some life made a little 
more livable by his wise musings. And yet 
one may wonder whether his influence on 
those more accustomed to lead than to fol- 
low is not even more noteworthy, as these 
words by August Strindberg seem to in- 
dicate : 

"One can neither steal nor borrow from 
Maeterlinck. It is even difficult to become 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 195 

his pupil, for there are no free passes that 
give entrance into his world of heauty. But 
one may he urged b}^ his example into 
searching one's own dross-heaps for gold — 
and it is in this sense that I acknowledge 
Hiy debt to the master." 

To take up his works separately would 
lead me beyond my present purpose. All 
I wish to do here is to suggest certain 
general aspects that seem inseparable from 
whatever he does — that, in a word, are one 
with his spirit. Of course, he must be 
acclaimed a master in the handling of the 
written word, and his mastery shows itself 
not the least in the harmony with which his 
sentences invariably are fraught. But the 
better part of the beauty springing from 
his soul lies, nevertheless, in the thoughts 
to which his words give wings — thoughts 
like the one shining brightly out of this 
passage: "Light, though so fragile, is 
perhaps the one thing of all that yields 
naught of itself as it faces immensity." 
Here we have infinity of time and space 



196 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

confined within a few words, spoken "with- 
out the air of having said anything more 
than the simplest observation." 

And his work abounds with thoughts that 
are equally sublime in aspect and in scope. 
Yet he never lets himself be tempted be- 
yond poetic suggestiveness into scientific 
exhaustiveness. The sense of things still 
unuttered always remains the final impres- 
sion. And perhaps it is in this implied 
abundance, this limitless reserve power, that 
his main appeal lies. For it is this side of 
his nature that has enabled him to look at 
life and death with such imperturbable eyes. 
Through that quiescent power, reaching 
beyond the spoken word into the one not 
yet breathed, he has carried peace to a time 
fatigued beyond endurance by an over-long 
struggle. 

For more than one hundred years, up 
to the closing decade of the last century, 
the cry was for action, and for ever more 
action. From Maeterlinck came the first 
truly inspired call to rest — but not to rest 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 197 

of the Tolstoyan, life-denying kind. The 
change foreshadowed by his pregnant words 
was meant to bring man nearer to life's 
innermost purpose — which he has himself 
declared to be perfection — and not away 
from it. For the mark of civilization is, 
after all, inhibition rather than stimulation. 
And by constantly accentuating the need 
for quiet, subconscious preparation, Maeter- 
linck has done much to dispose of that 
vaunted strenuousness which too often in 
the past degenerated into mere meaningless 
gyration. Not inaction, but action property 
determined, is his gospel. If we follow him, 
then conflict, which is hastened action, will 
be reduced to a minimum, while combina- 
tion and cooperation, which stand for action 
more fully prepared, will take more and 
more of the world's energy. 

Maeterlinck has been called a poet of the 
subconscious — or I may have called him so 
myself. The name is good, at any rate, and 
it finds warrant in the light he has poured 
into "that holy of holies of the 'Buried 



198 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

Temple,' in which our most intimate 
thoughts and the forces that lie beneath 
them and are unknown to us go in and out 
without our knowledge and grope in search 
of the mysterious road that leads to future 
events." But his main discovery and most 
significant revelation concerning the sub- 
conscious rests in the intimate connection 
which he has established between certain 
mysterious powers within ourselves and 
certain equally mysterious powers on the 
outside. What he shows — or tries to show 
— is that these two sets of powers are at 
bottom identical. 

Poetically he has accomplished what 
Bergson has achieved philosophically. Life, 
so threatening when lying wholly beyond 
our own selves, becomes homely and familiar 
when found at work within those same 
selves. The fear with which man has re- 
garded fate tends thus to change into happy 
faith — the unknown becomes the partly 
known — and in dealing with life, destiny, 
providence, man begins at last to feel as if 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 199 

he were but dealing with another self. But 
by opening up these new vistas into the 
heart of being, where our own image comes 
back to us as if mirrored in the pupil of a 
loved one's eye, Maeterlinck has done his 
share, and a large one at that, toward pre- 
paring a religious re- formulation- for which 
some of the best men on both sides of the 
ocean are now working ardently. When 
that formulation has been attained, I think 
it will be seen that Maeterlinck has con- 
tributed not only a conception of life as 
trustworthy, but of death as an integral 
part of life — and not the unkindliest at that. 
Like Tolstoy, like Zola, like so many 
other men of strong physique and vivid 
imagination, this dreamer from the Low- 
lands has been largely preoccupied with the 
inevitable moment of dissolution that forms 
the interrogation point at the end of every 
human career. But while Tolstoy sought 
to scare men into righteousness by enhanc- 
ing the terror of that ever-present spectre, 
one of Maeterlinck's chief tasks has been 



200 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

to breathe the breath of hope and sympa- 
thetic comprehension on our terror, and 
thus to melt it into vanishing mist. Of 
course, he began by staring at the spectre 
in open-eyed horror like the rest of us. For 
years its grim figure stalked through his 
plays like a veiled angel of darkness. But 
gradually there came light into his vision, 
and that vision widened and grew until all 
creation lay steeped in brightness. It is that 
vision he has tried to make ours — in "The 
Blue Bird," for instance — and when we 
possess it, then what has hitherto figured in 
our fancies as life's main curse will un- 
doubtedly change into one of its many bless- 
ings. 

Looking upon life and death in the way 
I have just tried to indicate, it is only 
natural that Maeterlinck should entertain 
toward humanity a vast tolerance — nay, 
more than that: an unshakable confidence. 
At one time a student of Nietzsche, and 
always a lover of Emerson, he has never- 
theless consistently refused to accept any 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 201 

view of the individual as the ultimate ob j ect 
of all existence, or as its supreme arbiter 
within the scope of human existence. 
Speaking of universal suffrage, which he 
holds a necessary step on the road to higher 
cultural development, he wrote that, "in 
those problems in which all life's enigmas 
converge, the crowd which is wrong is al- 
most always justified as against the wise 
man who is right." Yet he is anything but 
blind to the part played by the individual 
as a hand reached out by the race for its 
own uplifting, and he does not hesitate to 
assert that, "when the sage's destiny blends 
with that of men of inferior wisdom, the 
sage raises them to his level, but himself 
rarely descends." 

The full extent of his foresightedness, as 
well as the heart of his political faith, is 
laid bare when he comes to discuss the inter- 
action of those two opposed principles — 
the racial and the individual. Then he says 
that, when life below man is concerned, "all 
genius lies in the species, in life or in nature, 



202 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

whereas the individual is nearly always 
stupid." But in man, on the other hand — 
and in man alone — he finds that real emula- 
tion exists between the racial and the indi- 
vidual intelligences. In man he finds also 
a tendency "toward a sort of equilibrium 
which is the great secret of the future." 
And in the solving of that secret — the secret 
of how to make the man with a mission and 
the mass of ordinary men give each other 
mutual respect and support — lies the only 
hope of our modern democracies. 

Too often the essential difference between 
philosophy and wisdom is lost sight of. 
While all wisdom is based on some philo- 
sophical coordination of life's multiplicity, it 
would be dangerous to find wisdom in all 
that we now call philosophy. It is not out 
of place to give the title of philosopher to 
Maeterlinck — as Professor Dewey has 
pointed out — but he is more: a sage. Ap- 
plication lurks back of his most abstract 
speculations, and what he principally wants 
us to do is to learn in order to live. Both 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 203 

the manner and the result of such learning 
are suggested in this passage: "If we had 
applied to the removal of various neces- 
sities that crush us, such as pain, old age and 
death, one-half of the energy displayed by 
any little flower in our gardens, we may 
well believe that our lot would be very 
different from what it is." 

Somebody has said that he possesses "the 
child's faculty of wonder." This is true, 
and one reason for his power over our time 
is his untiring effort to turn us in childlike 
wonder toward that ocean of dumb life out 
of which we have risen into unique articu- 
lateness. Like Bergson, he wants to teach 
us how to soften the noise made by our 
reasons in order that we may catch the un- 
spoken messages passing from the rest of 
life into our instincts and intuitions. But 
to do so, we must cultivate the simplicity 
of spirit that has lived untainted in his own 
heart through so many years of conspicu- 
ous success — the simplicity that sends him 
out to watch his beloved bees in the early 



204 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

morn of every day, and that helps him to 
define the new mysticism he feels coming 
as "nothing more than a knowledge of self 
that has far overstepped the ordinary limits 
of consciousness." 



Ill 

Its Philosopher: Henri Bergson 

TO make straight for the point of this 
article: Why should, out of an un- 
obtrusive and unknown French scholar like 
Professor Henri Bergson, suddenly emerge 
a figure of world-wide interest and impor- 
tance ? 

Ten } T ears ago nobody dwelling outside 
the inner courts of organized knowledge 
paid the least attention to his sayings or 
doings. And to-day the whole civilized 
world is asking eagerly for the slightest de- 
tails relating to his private or public life. 
His books — of which there are only four, 
not counting his doctor's thesis — have each 
reached six or seven editions in the original, 
and they are now being hurriedly translated 

into one language after another. His 
205 



206 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

teachings are spreading, like flames across 
a sun-scorched prairie. Everywhere laymen 
and learned alike feel compelled to define 
their intellectual, moral and artistic atti- 
tudes by reference to his ideas. We find 
him quoted as their spiritual authority by 
leaders of the Syndicalist labor movement 
in France and by the young Tory Demo- 
crats of England, by the Modernist re- 
formers within the Catholic Church and by 
those audacious iconoclasts who, as Post- 
Impressionists, are startling the world with 
a new art form. 

"He has been accepted by the Symbolists 
as the philosopher of the new idea," writes 
an English journalist in regard to the latest 
movement in French poetry. And the 
same man informs us that "the intuitional 
philosophy of Bergson has so taken posses- 
sion of Paris that the spirit of it seems to 
fill every place." All this superficial popu- 
larity might merely arouse suspicion as to 
the man's genuine power and scope as a 
thinker, but when we turn to the other side 



HENRI BERGSON 207 

— to the world of expert opinion par prefer- 
ence — we meet with the same almost unani- 
mous recognition of Bergson's place and 
influence. "His appearance in the field of 
philosopli3 r promises to be a turning point 
in the history of human thought," writes a 
critic like G. R. T. Ross in the London 
Nation, and from innumerable other 
quarters the same note of unbounded en- 
thusiasm is heard. Even when his ideas, 
as such, are bitterly opposed, the learning 
and ingenuity displa} r ed in their presenta- 
tion are ungrudgingly acknowledged. 

In our search for causes capable of ex- 
plaining this abrupt rise of a quiet thinker 
into world-circling fame it is of little use to 
speak of "faddisms" and "passing fashions." 
For in the voice of Bergson there is not one 
sensational note. He has taken no step to 
attract or hold the attention of the greater 
public — though he believes passionately in 
working and writing for nothing less than 
all men. In his attitude toward truth and 
its right of way against all selfish interests 



208 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

or established superstitions, he is as uncom- 
promising as any other typical representa- 
tive of his class. And in spite of his lucid 
prose, vivid power of illustration, and con- 
stant effort at clearness and conciseness, his 
writings are by no means easy reading to 
a mind not trained in the ways of systematic 
thinking. There is, in a word, every reason 
to assume that his position is founded on 
true merit, and that, whatever ebb or in- 
creasing flood his outward popularity may 
experience after this, his spirit will become 
indelibly stamped on the world's thought, 
so that after having passed through him that 
thought must for all future be different 
from what it was before he appeared. 

To account for his extraordinary renown 
to-day, we must assume that his qualities 
and gifts and achievements are those of men 
like Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and 
Hegel, Schopenhauer and Comte, Spencer 
and James. In each such case, when the 
efforts of a single man have exercised marked 
effect not only on all subsequent thinking 



HEXRI BERGSON 209 

but on the conduct of the mass of his con- 
temporaries, we have, I think, to lead the 
result back to three cooperating factors: 
first, a strong and highly magnetic per- 
sonality, so that what the man says or does 
becomes supported and supplemented by 
what he is; secondly, a distinctly new way 
of seeing life and interpreting it, whereby 
man's timidity in front of the world-riddle 
becomes to some additional degree abated; 
and thirdly, a particular need on the part 
of mankind which is administered to by the 
wider vision of the man in question. We 
have in this country had a most striking 
example, in the person of the late William 
James, of such cooperation between a man's 
character, his creative thought, and the acute 
demand of the world at large. And Berg- 
son's case is, I feel sure, another one of the 
same kind, though perhaps even more re- 
markable — for did we not hear James him- 
self at the height of his fame apply the title 
of "master" to the younger and then less 
known Frenchman? 



210 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

In his career, as outlined by external 
facts, there is nothing that will throw much 
light on his success, though some have 
traced it in part to his foreign ancestry and 
cosmopolitan heritage. He is of Jewish 
and Polish descent, but his family came to 
France from the other side of the Channel. 
He himself was born in Paris, but became 
a Frenchman only b}^ naturalization, ob- 
tained after he had already entered the pub- 
lic schools. There must have been a great 
deal of inherent adaptability in his nature, 
for neither as student nor as teacher does he 
ever seem to have been in conflict with his 
surroundings — a rare fact to mention in the 
biography of a man of unmistakable genius. 
Yet he gave early evidence both of ability 
and originality. At 18 he took a prize in 
mathematics. And even in his doctor's 
thesis, finished in 1889, when he was thirty, 
the ideas which later brought him such re- 
nown may be found foreshadowed. When 
in 1900, after teaching for nearly twenty 
years in the high schools and normal colleges 



HENRI BERGSON 211 

maintained by the state, he was made pro- 
i'< ssor of modern philosophy in the ancient 
College of France, at Paris, the eyes of 
the learned world were already turned ex- 
pectantly in his direction, and his election to 
the French Institute a year later came as a 
matter of course. 

It was as a teacher he first began to lay 
the foundation of his influence on the pres- 
ent generation of Frenchmen, and it is from 
his success as a teacher that we get valuable 
light on his progress in general. That his 
success has been almost phenomenal may be 
judged by the gloomy forebodings uttered 
from time to time by leading representa- 
tives of older thought currents. Nothing 
less than a generation of students raised in 
total scorn of established scientific methods 
and ideals is what they have professed to 
fear. Whatever the outcome of it may 
prove, the fact remains that the great body 
of students in France is thoroughly inocu- 
lated with Bergsonism, while outside of that 
country the same set of ideas and ideals is 



212 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

conquering one university after another. 
Thus it is said that the students at Jena are 
more familiar with the works of the Parisian 
professor than with the "actualism" ex- 
pounded by their own venerable preceptor, 
Rudolf Eucken. 

Too often in the past the academic lec- 
turer seems to have measured his accom- 
plishments by the degree of abstruseness he 
managed to attain. And philosophy has 
equally often been nothing but an exciting 
game of hide and seek, with vanity for goad, 
and for goal alleged "truths" having little 
or no bearing on the "vulgar" issues of ordi- 
nary life. To this entire tendency of what 
has sometimes been called "mandarinism" 
the attitude of Bergson has from the start 
been frankly hostile. He seeks above every- 
thing else to make himself clear. And he 
does so to a large extent by constant refer- 
ence of his argument to the facts of actual 
existence. For mere sophistries he has no 
use whatever. And he takes his place con- 
spicuously with that growing group of 



HENRI BERGSON 213 

thinkers the world over who insist that phi- 
losophy, like everything else, must be for all 
mankind. 

What has just been said of his speaking 
applies with equal truth to his writing. He 
is a master of style, but one who always in- 
sists on making style a servant of the 
thought to be expressed. An English re- 
viewer says that his written work has "the 
unity and flow, above all the imagination, of 
a poem." Nevertheless it is always "loaded" 
— every line betrays a vast knowledge that 
is never one-sided or pedantic. Thus the 
reviewer just quoted wonders at the fact 
that Bergson shows equal command of "an- 
cient speculation" and of modern biology. 
Though starting as a mathematician, he has 
mastered the most difficult art of translat- 
ing abstract thought into terms of concrete 
life — as when, to give only one instance, he 
speaks of consciousness as "a momentary 
spark flying up from the friction of real ac- 
tions against possible actions." 

So far he has, as already mentioned, pro- 



214 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

duced only four volumes — the first of these 
in 1889, and the latest one in 1907. The 
third to be completed and the last to be 
translated into English was "Le Rire" 
(Laughter), on which its author spent 
nearly twenty years of study and thought. 
It deals with laughter as a social function, 
the author's leading idea being contained in 
this sentence: "The function of laughter is 
to punish and to repress certain actions that 
appear as defects to the social conscious- 
ness." This sharp accentuation of man's 
social side is very characteristic of Berg- 
son's whole attitude. It colors all his ideas 
and theories, and in the light of it one finds 
it hard to understand how some of his 
avowed but uninvited followers — like the 
anarchistically inclined Syndicalists — have 
been able to draw any inspiration from his 
teachings. 

His other three volumes have been 
brought out here under the following titles : 
"Time and Free Will," "Matter and Mem- 
ory," "Creative Evolution." The first two 



HENRI BERGSON 215 

deal with certain fundamental problems of 
consciousness and are more closely special- 
ized than the third. Through them Berg- 
son has endeavored to establish the reality 
of time — of which he says that "we do not 
think it, but live it, because life transcends 
intellect" — and the presence of an element 
of free choice and consequent unforeseeable- 
ness in all of man's actions. In the intro- 
duction to "Matter and Memory" occurs a 
passage that seems to summarize both the 
basis and the spirit of all that he has writ- 
ten. There are two principles, he says, 
which he has used as a clue throughout his 
researches : 

"The first is that in psychological anal- 
ysis we must never forget the utilitarian 
character of our mental functions, which are 
essentially turned toward action. The sec- 
ond is that the habits formed in action find 
their way up to the sphere of speculation, 
where they create fictitious problems, and 
that metaphysics must begin by disposing of 
this artificial obscurity." 



216 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

From first to last, "Creative Evolution" 
is largely concerned with the clearing away 
of just such "artificial obscurities," by which 
reality has become overlaid in the course of 
man's millennial groping toward an under- 
standing of it. Beyond all doubt it is Berg- 
son's greatest book, as it is his latest — and 
the one into which he has put most not only 
of his system but of himself. The person- 
ality of the man — with all its rare treas- 
ures of simplicity and sincerity, of in- 
sight and of sympathy, of common sense 
and of fancy — shines gloriously through 
every one of its pages. And it is in 
these pages he has given that something 
which is at once new and fitted to meet the 
crying need of his time — the something, in 
other words, that sets him aside as a thinker 
of creative originality. In this work he has 
no longer been satisfied to deal with mere 
isolated phases of life, but has — in accord- 
ance with the philosopher's time-honored 
right — pushed on toward certain universal 
conclusions, shaping themselves at last 



HENRI BERGSON 217 

into a logical totality of cosmic inter- 
pretation. 

For the professional philosopher the 
book is rich in startling and, of course, de- 
batable propositions, with which I shall not 
concern myself here. For I want to get at 
the very heart of the Frenchman's thought 
— the way in which he conceives and meets 
the riddle of life itself. First of all, then, 
he finds us using two different instruments 
in dealing with life, and he draws a sharp 
distinction between the origin, nature and 
function, on one side, of instinct, and, on 
the other, of intellect. The main thing to 
all philosophy so far has been thought: the 
main thing to Bergson is the act of living 
and our unformulated sense of it — that is 
intuition, or "instinct turned self-con- 
scious." 

"Instinct," he says, "is moulded on the 
very form of life. If the consciousness that 
slumbers in it could awake, if it were wound 
up into knowledge instead of being wound 
off into action, if we could ask and it could 



218 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

answer, it would give up to us the most inti- 
mate secrets of life." And he cries to us: 
"Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes 
of the intellect alone, which grasps only the 
already made and which looks from the out- 
side, but with the spirit; I mean with that 
faculty of seeing which is immanent in the 
faculty of acting and which springs up, 
somehow, by the twisting of the will on it- 
self, when action is turned into knowledge, 
like heat, so to say, into light." 

He does not scorn or spurn intellect. On 
the contrary, its cooperation is needed for 
the utterance of what is laid bare by intui- 
tion. Seen thus, "with the spirit," an essen- 
tial dualism is found at the bottom of all ex- 
istence — the dualism between matter and 
life, between unorganized and organized be- 
ing. "The vision we have of the material 
world is that of a weight which falls," he 
says; "but all our analyses show us, in life, 
an effort to remount the incline that matter 
descends." Out of the effort made by life, 
"the reality which ascends," to overcome, or 



HENRI BERGSON 210 

at least to suspend, the downward rush of 
matter, springs the tangible and visible uni- 
verse. 

Life proper reveals itself above all as a 
flux and a creation. "To exist is to change, 
to change is to mature, and to mature is to 
go on creating oneself endlessly," Bergson 
tells us. Back of all this creative change he 
finds a common impetus that he calls the 
elan vital — the life-urge. We may imagine 
it as "a centre from which worlds shoot out 
like rockets in a fire-works display." As 
here, so it is at work everywhere, shaping, 
developing, initiating. "It is probable that 
life goes on in other planets, in other solar 
systems also, under forms of which we have 
no idea." For life, in the eyes of Bergson, 
is neither an accident nor a voluntary act of 
some supernatural being: it is a universal 
necessity. 

Evolution he sees not as a straight line, 
but as a sheaflike divergence of forms. 
Some lines come quickly to an end. Others 
stretch onward with constant offshoot of 



220 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

new branches. Each onward step has to be 
bought by the surrender of something that 
until then had remained common property, 
and which thereafter will become character- 
istic of a parallel form. Thus, for instance, 
the vegetable kingdom represents chiefly the 
general tendency of life to store up energy, 
while the animal kingdom specializes, so to 
speak, in the expenditure of energy. 

To Bergson each form appears as a nar- 
rowly restricted delegate of the life-urge, 
devised for a distinct purpose, and permit- 
ted to regard this purpose as the end of all 
life. "Each species, each individual even, 
retains only a certain impetus from the uni- 
versal vital impulsion, and tends to use this 
energy in its own interest." Hence the ego- 
ism that marks each separate species as well 
as specimen. The principal social signifi- 
cance of Bergson's ideas, however, lies in his 
statement that "everywhere the tendency to 
individualize is opposed and at the same time 
completed by an antagonistic and comple- 
mentary tendency to associate." The evolu- 



HENRI BERGSON 221 

tion of being in this double direction is due 
to the very nature of life. Thus "society, 
as soon as formed, tends to melt the asso- 
ciated individuals into a new organism, so 
as to become itself an individual, able in its 
turn to be part and parcel of a new associa- 
tion. " Beyond the human mind we divine 
the race-mind : behind the individual will, an 
all-inclusive world-will. 

When we have reached this point we have 
also reached the most comprehensive aspect 
of Bergson's thought — an aspect which 
Professor Love joy has indicated by his ref- 
erence, in the works of more than one 
prominent thinker of to-day, to "a genu- 
inely radical evolutionism, which is at the 
same time of a highly romantic and religious 
spirit." It is nothing less than a new re- 
ligious formulation that seems to shape it- 
self before our rapt vision when Bergson 
says that God, as defined in the light of the 
life-urge theory, "has nothing of the already 
made," but is "unceasing life, action, free- 
dom." Another vista of equally startling 



222 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

nature is opened up by his assertion that 
"the whole of humanity, in space and in 
time, is one immense army galloping beside 
and before and behind each of us in an over- 
whelming charge, able to beat down every 
resistance and clear the most formidable ob- 
stacles, perhaps even death." 

A divine principle, lying ahead and not 
behind us; an immortality not miraculously 
conferred but logically attained: these ap- 
pear to be some of the possibilities contained 
in Bergson's audacious conclusions. And it 
is undoubtedly through his courage in draw- 
ing out the consequences of his own 
thoughts thus far — and through his ability 
to do so without for a moment losing his 
firm hold on the actuality with which we are 
all familiar — that he has won his dominant 
place not only in the heads of the few but 
in the hearts of the many. 

Like President Eliot, like the late Pro- 
fessor James, like all those earnest and able 
men who are banded together in the world- 
embracing Monistic Union, Bergson must 



HENRI BERGSON 223 

feel that much of what still passes current 
as religion has lost its background of act- 
ual experience, while at the same time the 
need of man to relate himself to the un- 
known as well as to the known has grown 
no less poignant than it was in the past. 
And to him more than to anybody else, as 
I see it, has it been given to restate the 
truths of being in such manner that they 
become, not a religion in themselves, but 
the firm basis on which a new and more rev- 
erential conception of the great insolvable 
mysteries of life may be reared. 



GRAAL KNIGHTS OF MODERN 
LETTERS 



George Gissing 

"fT^HE name of Henry Ryecroft never 
■*■ became familiar to what is called the 
reading public. A year ago obituary para- 
graphs in the literary papers gave such ac- 
count of him as was thought needful: the 
date and place of his birth, the names of 
certain books he had written, an allusion to 
his work in the periodicals, the manner of 
his death. At the time it sufficed. Even 
those few who knew the man, and in a meas- 
ure understood him, must have felt that his 
name called for no further celebration." 

These opening words of the preface to 
"The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," 
the last book by Gissing published during 

224 



GEORGE GISSING 225 

his lifetime, were prophetic of what hap- 
pened when the man who wrote them actual- 
ly died in 1904, carried away less by disease 
than Ity his own inability to husband his vi- 
tal resources. A leading New York daily, 
which prides itself on being rather more 
"literary" than its rivals, disposed of the 
event in three lines. Most of the other 
newspapers said nothing at all. To the pub- 
lic at large the news carried no significance 
whatever. 

Gissing was never popular. He knew it 
and accepted the fact without resentment. 
Public favor was not his object. At the 
very beginning of his career as writer, he 
set up for himself an artistic ideal and pro- 
nounced an artistic creed to which he re- 
mained faithful to the end. Neither ideal 
nor creed was of a kind tending to make 
him one of the public's pampered, much-ad- 
vertised and much-selling favorites. Both 
are found in "The Unclassed." 

This was not his first book, appearing 
four years later than the almost forgotten 



226 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

"Workers in the Dawn." But it was the 
first one in which the true temper of Gis- 
sing's art found adequate expression. Like 
"The Private Papers," it is largely, if not 
wholly, autobiographical. The central fig- 
ure, Osmond Waymavk, is Gissing himself. 
Waymarh, who gave up teaching to pursue 
the literary vocation, just as his creator had 
done, says: 

"Let me get a little more experience, and 
I will write a book such as no one has yet 
ventured to write, at all events in England. 
Not virginibus puerisque will be my book, I 
assure you, but for men and women who 
like to look beneath the surface, and who 
understand that only as artistic material has 
human life any significance." 

Gissing wrote not only one book, but 
many of the kind he promised in that first 
mature work of his, which appeared in 1884. 
He wrote "The Nether World," "New 
Grub Street," "In the Year of Jubilee," 
"The Whirlpool," "Our Friend the Char- 
latan," and nearly a score more of novels 



GEORGE GISSING 227 

and short stories. The works just named 
are those which, in my opinion, reach the 
high-water mark of his achievement. This 
means that they must be counted among the 
strongest pieces of imaginative writing con- 
tained in modern Anglo-American litera- 
ture. But all his works, even those in which 
his genius seemed to flag and lose itself un- 
der the harassments of an adverse fate, dis- 
play, although in less degree, the traits that 
place him so far beyond and above the com- 
mon herd of caterers to the literary taste of 
the public. Sincerity of purpose, shrewd- 
ness of observation, depth of sympathy, and 
command of form are some of the qualities 
common to them all. 

If they fail, it is in not being entertaining 
in the accepted sense of the day. Each of 
them is a piece of life, terrible at times in its 
reality, but never loathsome. They are the 
creations of a man who had the courage to 
face life as he found it, and who vowed to 
describe it as he saw it, not as his readers 
might like it to appear. Of revolting nat- 



228 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

uralism in details there is next to none. 
Even when dealing with the life led by the 
lowest and most unfortunate of human be- 
ings, the women of the streets, Gissing 
showed a reserve in the handling of his ma- 
terial, without ever missing the desired ef- 
fect, which might be offered as an object les- 
son to many European writers and some in 
this country. No, what scares away the 
reader who comes to his pages in search of 
amusement only is the note of sadness that 
sounds through most of them, the assertion 
again and again of the spirit which once 
prompted Gissing to declare that: "Art, 
nowadays, must be the mouthpiece of mis- 
ery, for misery is the keynote of modern 
life." 

Those words might have been written by 
Strindberg. In fact, there is much in Giss- 
ing that reminds the reader of the Swede, 
and their pessimistic outlook on life was es- 
sentially identical, just as the causes pro- 
ducing their viewpoints had much resem- 
blance. Gissing, however, proved himself 



GEORGE GISSIXG 229 

much more capable of separating his own 
fate from the general course of life, without 
confusion of the two. He was braver as a 
man, less given to make his art the vehicle 
of personal grievances, though in power and 
skill and dynamic penetration he fell far 
short of the man who wrote "The Dance of 
Death" and "Inferno." 

A man writing words like those quoted 
above, and meaning them, could of course 
never be popular, hardly even with the crit- 
ics. What better warrant could there be 
for the charge brought by a newspaper at 
the time of his death — that of his "taking 
a gloomy view of life." Yet I might quote 
"The Town Traveller" and "The Crown of 
Life" as evidence against the truth of that 
charge, but it may be better, after all, to let 
it stand. If Gissing's view of life was som- 
bre and sober, there was, as I have already 
hinted at, so much in his own existence to 
account for it. Of his life, as of Strind- 
berg's, misery was the keynote, indeed. 

While a mere lad he had to begin earning 



280 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

his own livelihood. After a period of rela- 
tively carefree but utterly uncongenial toil- 
ing, the day came at last when the voice 
within could no longer be silenced. Litera- 
ture was to be his calling. The start was 
made under conditions that might have de- 
terred the most temerarious, and for years 
his steps were dogged by hunger and many 
shaped hardships. He lived in cellars. He 
ate his meals in places that would have of- 
fered a way- wearied tramp chances for crit- 
icism. His breakfast consisted often of a 
slice of bread and a drink of water — and too 
often it was the one meal of the day. Four- 
and-sixpence a week paid for his lodging. 
A meal that cost more than a sixpence was 
a feast. The ordinary comforts of modern 
life were unattainable luxuries to him. 
Once when a newly posted notice in the lav- 
atory of the British Museum warned read- 
ers that "the basins were to be used for 
casual ablutions only," he was abashed and 
startled because of his own complete de- 
pendency on the facilities of the place. 



GEORGE GISSING 231 

Through all the hard years he remained 
alone, foregathering with none of the Bo- 
hemian clusters that abound in London, and 
having only one friend to converse with. 

And through all that misery and squalor 
and soul-breaking poverty he pursued the 
aim he had set for himself with indomitable, 
never-flinching persistency and courage, 
quaking at heart now and then, but never 
imagining himself for a moment a hero or a 
martyr. 

"I had a goal before me, and not the goal 
of the average man," he exulted years later 
in an hour of retrospection. "Even when 
pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my 
purposes, which were of the mind." And 
again this of his mental attitude at the time : 
"How surprised and indignant I should 
have felt had I known of any one who pitied 
me." 

Homer and Shakespeare were his con- 
stant companions in those days, lying within 
easy reach on the corner of "the filthy deal 
table" that served as his writing desk. To 



232 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

find money for the purchase of books, which 
to him were a necessity as much as the air 
he breathed, he had often to forego a meal. 
For six years he trod the pavements of Lon- 
don "without stepping once on mother 
earth" or being able to satisfy his passionate 
love and longing for nature. At times he 
suffered from prolonged, savage headaches. 
Medical treatment was out of the question. 
All he could do was to lock his door, go to 
bed, and lie there, without food or drink, 
till he became able to look after himself 
again. 

There can be slight doubt that those 
years laid the foundation of a structural 
weakness which rendered resistance impossi- 
ble when the critical moment arrived. Those 
were the days of violent radicalism, when he 
lectured to workingmen's clubs, "knew 
what it was to feel the heart burn with wrath 
and envy of the privileged classes," and 
fought for the freedom of the poor and the 
ignorant "because he was himself in the 
bondage of unsatisfiable longing." Echoes 



GEORGE GISSING 233 

of them are found in "Demos" and "The 
Nether World." 

Then came better days, with "assurance 
of food and clothing for half a year at the 
time." He had, to use his own words again, 
succeeded in pleasing and making himself 
a profit to the editors and publishers who 
represented the vague throng of readers — 
his actual employers. He was able at last 
to satisfy his fondness for nature and for 
travelling. 

The autobiographical character of "The 
Unclassed" has been mentioned. It is 
chiefly the story of a young woman whose 
love for Osmond Waymark gives her 
strength to reclaim herself from the life of 
shame into which fate rather than her own 
fault had forced her. In the end she is mar- 
ried to him, and the happiness of their union 
seems assured. Gissing married twice — 
first a woman of the kind just indicated, and 
later a servant girl. Both marriages were 
unhappy, and out of them grew the worst 
clouds that overshadowed the middle years 



234 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

of his life, retarding his growth, cramping 
his powers and embittering his mind still 
further. But he fought and conquered sor- 
row as previously he had gained victory in 
his battle with poverty and distress. Of the 
appearance and mental and moral make-up 
of the man who finally emerged from that 
double test, I like to think in the terms em- 
ployed by Gissing himself for the picturing 
of Osmond Way mark: 

"There was nothing commonplace in his 
appearance and manner ; one divined in him 
a past out of the ordinary range of expe- 
riences, and felt the promise of a future 
which would, in one way or another, be re- 
markable. . . . There was a ring in his 
voice which inspired faith; whatever might 
be his own doubts and difficulties — and his 
face testified to his knowledge of both — it 
was so certain that he had power to over- 
come them." 

Add to this the description of Henry 
Ryecroft in the preface to "The Private 
Papers": "He had suffered much from de- 



GEORGE GISSING 235 

feated ambition, from disillusions of many 
kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; 
the result of it was not a broken spirit, but a 
mind and temper so sternly disciplined, 
that, in ordinary intercourse with him, one 
did not know but that he led a calm, con- 
tented life." 

Just such I like to imagine the man who, 
to my thinking, broke important new 
paths for the English novel, besides tread- 
ing the old ones with so much success. 
Many have already followed where he led 
the way. As early as 1884 he wrote: "The 
fact is, the novel of everyday life is getting 
worn out. We must dig deeper, to yet un- 
touched social strata." 

He did what he preached. That was 
years before the name of Gorky was ever 
heard of. Having explored the nethermost 
depths, Gissing ascended a few steps and 
began to devote his attention to a social 
stratum of which he speaks in "Our Friend 
the Charlatan" as: "That vague multitude 
between the refined middle class and the 



236 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

rude toilers, which plays such an important 
part in modern civilization. Among these 
people, energy is naked, motives are direct. 
There the strength and the desires of the 
people become vocal." 

The results of this new venture were "In 
the Year of Jubilee" and "The Town 
Traveller," two of his most remarkable 
books, in which we are introduced to a class 
of people that have never before appeared 
in literature, as it seems to me. Such fig- 
ures as the three sisters in the former book 
and the town traveller himself, the spright- 
ly, irrepressible, wide-hearted Mr. Gam- 
mon, have about them a freshness and an 
originality which lend additional bitterness 
to the thought that the pen of their creator 
had to be laid down so prematurely. 

Gissing's drawing of character was never 
permitted to become caricature. Whether 
dealing with some titled aristocrat or some 
grotesque shape from the slums, half man, 
half beast, he went about his task with the 
same unprejudiced regard for truth, and for 



GEORGE GISSING 237 

truth only. But the final explanation of his 
success lies in the sympathy which he gave 
to all his figures. "The artist should be free 
from everything like moral prepossession," 
he wrote once. 

This principle may be seen at work 
throughout his books. There is no judging 
or sorting of good and bad. Each charac- 
ter is allowed to stand on its merits. The 
author states facts, but does not condemn. 
Harvey Rolfe in "The Whirlpool" — one of 
the most attractive figures drawn by Giss- 
ing and one of the finest specimens of true 
manhood that ever captured a reader's 
heart and fancy — is not treated with more 
consideration or forbearance than the 
wretched Harriet Castle in "The Un- 
classed" or "Our Friend the Charlatan," the 
slick Mr. Dyce Lashmar. 

Love and art were regarded by this al- 
leged pessimist as the moving principles of 
life, and only by their pursuit could life get 
meaning. "Beauty is the solace of life, and 
love is the end of being," he said in one 



238 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

place. Humor of the conventional kind he 
never essayed. Yet he was not incapable of 
comprehending and appreciating the humor 
that springs spontaneously out of life, as 
may be seen in "The Unclassed" when 
O'Gree and his Sally meet and make love 
in the mummy room of the British Museum 
for want of a more appropriate trysting- 
place. 

The day will come, I think, and soon 
enough, when Gissing will be read and 
treasured according to his desert. In the 
meantime the admirers of his art — a grow- 
ing host — will have to bear in mind the 
manly words he used in "The Private Pa- 
pers" in reference to himself: "The world 
has done me no injustice. Why should any 
man who writes, even if he write things im- 
mortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? 
For the work of man's mind there is one 
test, and one alone, the judgment of gener- 
ations yet unborn. If you have written a 
great book, the world to come will know of 
it." 



GEORGE GISSING 239 

NOTE.— Morley Roberts's "The Private 
Life of Henry Maitland" fell into my hands 
while I was preparing this volume for the 
press. It enabled me to correct a few mis- 
taken dates and facts, but it caused no desire 
to change the spirit of what I wrote just 
after Gissing's death. 



II 

Joseph Conrad 

IF some one asked me suddenly to define 
the fundamental nature of art, I should 
answer unhesitatingly: it is interpretative 
imitation of life. This universal character- 
istic of all true art indicates also where lies 
Joseph Conrad's claim to world-wide re- 
nown. He is one who copies life in such 
manner that, to the beholder, it becomes 
more intelligible, and thereby more livable. 
But even as an artist he holds a place apart, 
appearing to us a sort of modern knight of 
the Holy Graal, seeking ever the wondrous 
vessel in which beauty, worth and truth are 
said to mingle in triune radiance. 

Imitation of life in artistic form demands 
240 



JOSEPH CONRAD 241 

above all else on discipline — a simple-hearted 
subordination of one's own self to something 
that lies beyond it. And this subordination 
must neither be timid nor cringing, as truth 
cannot come out of fear or flattery. The 
form that we call artistic stands for interpre- 
tation, whereby the rhythmic pulse of life is 
rendered sensible to us. And for such inter- 
pretation is needed an insight almost divine 
in its penetration. Finalty, for the blending 
of discipline and insight into a single- 
minded acceptance of whatever life may 
present, without effort at a final judgment 
that could be given only by omniscience, the 
artist needs endless sympathy with every 
aspect and utterance of that vital flow of 
which all visible and audible things are but 
so many shadows and echoes. 

Discipline, s} r mpathy, insight are the in- 
dispensable qualities of an inspired artist. 
And these are the qualities that have shaped 
Conrad's strange career, turning an inland 
lad into a deep-sea sailor, and making a 
master of English out of one who "did not 



242 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

know six words of the language" when he 
was nineteen. Up to the end of 1912, he 
had to his credit sixteen volumes of fiction 
and reminiscences, not counting his one play 
or the two novels produced in collaboration 
with another man. In 1908 no less a critic 
than John Galsworthy remarked of his first 
ten volumes that they probably constituted 
"the only writing of the last twelve years 
that would enrich the English language to 
any great extent." And more recently 
Conrad has had the none too common honor 
of being granted a small pension out of 
the British civil list. Considering the ob- 
stacles he has had to overcome in order to 
gain such recognition, one may well be 
tempted into describing his achievement as 
unique. 

He was born in 1857, somewhere in Po- 
land. His full name was Joseph Conrad 
Korzeniowski, and that name he retained 
until his first book appeared in print. His 
family belonged to the landed gentry of 
Poland, but as a mere child, while sharing 



JOSEPH CONRAD 243 

the exile of his parents, he had to learn the 
hard lessons of poverty and privation. His 
father was a student, a writer, and a 
dreamer: one who translated Shakespeare 
and Hugo into Polish and tried to use his 
pen for the preservation of the threatened 
Polish nationality. His mother risked un- 
flinchingly her own life in order to share 
her husband's exile. 

The shadow of Russian despotism fell 
blightingly on the child's most sensitive 
years. It killed his mother outright by 
forcing her to take a long journey when al- 
ready seriously ill. Her death hastened 
that of her husband. In his maternal 
uncle's home, where the orphaned boy found 
a refuge, there was hardly a face that did 
not speak of sorrow and suffering earned by 
the heroic support of a lost cause. Under 
the spur of those early impressions, the boy 
dreamt of joining the Turks in their war 
against Russia. And it is indeed a wonder 
that the man who grew out of that boy did 
not put a still worse sting into the irony 



2U VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

that saturates, and even a little mars, so 
many pages in his recent Russian novel, 
"Under Western Eyes." 

While still a boy, his mind was mightily 
drawn by everything connected with travel- 
ling and exploration. At the age of ten, he 
put his finger on the large blank space which 
then formed the heart of Africa on all maps 
and said: "When I grow up, I will go 
there." And so he did more than twenty 
years later. Among the belongings he car- 
ried with him and nearly lost on that trip 
up the Congo river to Stanley Falls was the 
manuscript of the first few chapters of "Al- 
mayer's Folly," his first book. And out of 
the same trip came by and by that marvel- 
lous story of his, "Heart of Darkness," 
which, in its own way, is probably without 
a peer in all literature. 

He was never aware of learning to read — 
so early in his life did that momentous event 
take place. But at six he learned French 
from a governess. There is a story to the 
effect that, when at last he took to writing, 



JOSEPH CONRAD 245 

he debated long and earnestly with himself 
which language to choose for his medium: 
French or English. The story has the vir- 
tue of not being inherently impossible. 
But I doubt nevertheless its authenticity, 
for at fifteen he had made up his mind not 
only to become a sailor, but a British sailor ; 
and when, at nineteen, in the harbor of Mar- 
seilles, he heard a few words of English 
spoken for the first time out of an English 
mouth, that event impressed itself so 
strongly on his mind that, a score of years 
later, he was moved to make it the closing 
event of the reminiscent volume he has 
named "A Personal Record." 

As a boy of eight he read his first Shake- 
speare play, ''Two Gentlemen of Verona," 
in a Polish translation made by his father. 
At ten he had read most of Victor Hugo's 
works. A little later he became acquainted 
with the novels of Dickens, and devoured 
them eagerly — in Polish. To this day 
Dickens is one of his firm favorites, another 
one being Henry James. As a student at 



246 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the university of Cracow, or travelling with 
a tutor who himself was a man of unusual 
promise, he must have gathered up a store 
of conventional learning. Yet he has said 
of himself that "the studies came hard to 
him," and the tutor had to give up the at- 
tempt of driving the sea out of his mind. 
When, at nineteen, he forced his despairing 
relatives into letting him follow his natural 
bent, his action represented, to use his own 
happy phrase, "a standing jump out of his 
racial surroundings and conditions." 

His first experiences as a sailor were ob- 
tained in small vessels on the Mediter- 
ranean, and on a West Indian trip in a 
French ship that had to be pumped all the 
way to keep it from sinking. But very soon 
he made his way to England, the land of 
his dreams, finding his first employment in 
a coasting vessel. The Far East, another 
cherished goal, he did not reach until he had 
won a mate's certificate. From an eastern 
city, Bangkok, he started out with his first 
command, which made him master of a 500- 



JOSEPH CONRAD 247 

ton bark. During his twenty years at sea, 
he tasted all the hardships, all the vicissi- 
tudes, and all the adventures, bad and good, 
that used to form an inevitable part of a 
sailor's lot. As a seaman, whether stationed 
before the mast or on the quarter-deck, he 
made good. There, as later, the indispensa- 
ble qualities of the artist told. And though, 
with a touch of melancholy seldom found in 
him, he has told us that all the long and try- 
ing years at sea brought him nothing but "a 
dozen or so of commendatory letters," we, 
who have read his books, know that those 
years brought him something more : a sense 
of life's fullness and seriousness that has 
proved the steadying principle of his art, 
keeping it forever from entering the shal- 
low waters where, side by side, wait cheap 
success and sure oblivion. 

What moved Conrad to try his hand at 
writing was, according to himself, "a hid- 
den, obscure necessity, a completely masked 
and unaccountable phenomenon," and not 
"the famous need of self-expression which 



248 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

artists find in their search for motives." 
Previously he had written nothing but let- 
ters, and few of those. He had never 
"made a note of a fact, of an impression or 
of an anecdote," and "the conception of a 
planned book was entirely outside his men- 
tal range when he sat down to write" — in 
furnished rooms at Pimlico Square, Lon- 
don. 

The truth of it seems to be that the germ 
of a story, a striking figure calling for ar- 
tistic re-embodiment, had chanced across his 
path while the first glow of the East was 
still fresh in his mind. For years he car- 
ried it about with him as a haunting possi- 
bility. And at last resistance became im- 
possible. Thus "Almayer's Folly" came 
into being, but not in one stroke. Five 
years lay between the writing of the first 
and the last chapters of that book, which, 
when published in 1895, brought him a great 
deal of immediate recognition. 

During those five years Conrad travelled 
back and forth over the face of the earth. 



JOSEPH CONRAD 249 

Some chapters were written in those rooms 
at Pimlico Square; others in the equatorial 
regions of Africa, on board a steamer 
frozen fast in the Seine at Rouen, in a hy- 
dropathic establishment near Geneva, and 
in a waterside warehouse at London. Twice 
the manuscript was nearly lost: once in the 
Congo rapids, and another time in a hotel 
at Warsaw. During a journey to Aus- 
tralia, the author submitted nine finished 
chapters to one of the passengers, a Cam- 
bridge graduate, with the question: "Is it 
worth finishing?" All the answer he got 
was: "Decidedly!" 

There are now, as I have already said, 
sixteen volumes to his credit — nine novels 
of varying length, five collections of short 
stories, a volume of reminiscent essays deal- 
ing with the sea, and another volume of 
frankly personal character. Between them, 
those works cover the five continents. But 
most of the stories deal with life on the high 
seas and in the tropics. I believe that no 
other writer has surpassed Conrad in the 



250 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

picturing of those two fields of human en- 
deavor — the endlessly variable sea, and the 
tropics, where life and death, fierce passion 
and dreamy languor, are always found close 
together, like twin kernels within a single 
shell. And so vivid are his pictures, so 
keen is his analysis, that he makes us posi- 
tively sense the regions described by him. 
In other words, he enables us to experience 
vicariously, whether it be the tropics or the 
ocean, with almost the same acuteness and 
accuracy as if our experiences were being 
obtained at first hand. And this is undoubt- 
edly the first and foremost mission of the 
poet. 

To achieve that effect, Conrad has first 
of all his power of evoking vivid images, as 
when he tells us how "the ship became a 
high and lonely pyramid gliding, all shin- 
ing and white, through the sunlit mist." 
With this picturesqueness in the best sense 
goes an equally notable power of charac- 
terization, of making us grasp situations or 
souls by means of some felicitous phrase 



JOSEPH CONRAD 251 

that cannot be forgotten. Thus he says of 
Captain Mitchell in "Nostromo" that "he 
was too pompously and innocently aware of 
his own existence to observe that of others." 
Back of each happ}^ expression lies his 
merciless faculty of observation. He sees 
everything, and sees it right. When Single- 
ton, the Nestor in the forecastle of the Nar- 
cissus, turned the pages of the book he was 
reading, "the muscles of his big white arms 
rolled slightly under the smooth skin." 
Little touches of reality, so subtle that not 
one man in a thousand would think of them, 
and yet so palpably true that without them 
the story would seem incomplete, meet us 
constantly. Here is an instance. When, in 
"The Nigger of the Narcissus," the dis- 
gusted crew inspected the forecastle which 
had been flooded by the storm, they found 
the ship's cat miraculously saved. Then 
some one brought a bucket of fresh water, 
and "Tom, lean and mewing, came up with 
every hair astir and had the first drink." 
But Conrad's realism is never satisfied 



252 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

with mere surface appearances. The souls 
of things and of men shine through his 
words and carry us on to a new under- 
standing. 

As he can take us to any part of the 
globe and make us at home there, so he 
knows every mood of man and how to make 
us share it. Tragedy and farce find him 
equally ready and equally impartial. For 
sheer pathos some of his passages have 
rarely been excelled — as the one that tells 
of the final revelation of Razmnov's guilt 
to Nathalie Haldin in "Under Western 
Eyes." And when there is a laugh to be 
had out of the life he is dealing with, he 
can be gently ironical, as when he lets 
Captain Mc Whirr in "Typhoon" read up 
"the chapter on the winds" while the storm 
is breaking; or he can give us screaming 
farce as in "Almayer's Folly," when 
Babalatchi, "the statesman of Sambir," has 
to spend his night grinding out "Trovatore" 
on a hand organ to sooth the disturbed soul 
of his master. 



JOSEPH CONRAD 253 

Conrad's art, of course, is no more flaw- 
less than anything else of human origin. 
Fault has heen found with his apparent dis- 
regard of chronological order. But what 
seems like careless rambling is intentional, 
and though at times carried a little too far, 
it adds to the verisimilitude of his stories 
by giving them an air of genuine reminis- 
cences. More serious is his disregard of the 
modern demand that the course of events 
involved in the tale shall be seen through the 
eyes of a single personality, and that 
nothing shall be told but what could natur- 
ally be known to that one observer. Of 
this mistake, however, Conrad is not guilty 
in his later works, although in some of these, 
like "Nostromo," he has frankly assumed 
the position and knowledge of an omniscient 
creator, to whom not only the actions but 
even the thoughts of every actor in the 
drama lie wholly open. This marks a re- 
turn to artistic conventions now generally 
discarded and condemned, and only his suc- 
cess in making the reader forget everything 



254 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

but the tale itself can be quoted in his de- 
fense. 

Galsworthy has said that in Conrad's 
novels "nature is first, and man second. " 
That is not true. In every one of his stories 
man might be said to constitute "the main 
show." Nature is present in abundance, but 
only as seen and heard and felt by man. 
Conrad himself has declared that "it is we 
alone who, swayed by the audacity of our 
minds and the tremors of our hearts, are 
the sole artisans of all the wonder and 
romance of the world." A typical instance 
of man's central position in his work may 
be found in the part played by the snow- 
capped dome of Higuerota in "Nostromo": 
ever-present, dominating the entire land- 
scape, but perceived by us only through the 
eyes of old Viola gazing from the doorway 
of his inn at the eternal snows. 

Rut while the adventures of men, phys- 
ical and spiritual, give Conrad his themes, 
and while he might be expected to remain 
satisfied if only those men seem sufficiently 



JOSEPH CONRAD 255 

convincing in their uncompromising indi- 
vidualities, there is in his works something 
more, something still bigger, something of 
which he may or may not be conscious him- 
self. Through all of them runs a strange 
but unmistakable symbolism. Each novel 
and story seems to stage some elementary 
passion in many shades and variations. 

The storm has been called the hero of 
" Typhoon." It is no more so than the Chi- 
nese fighting for silver dollars in the 'tween- 
deck. The storm, the boat, the crew, the 
rest of the officers, are little more than so 
much background for the figure of Captain 
McWhirr. And while Mc Whirr is as real 
to us as words can make him, he, in his 
turn, is but a symbol for a human quality — 
that of courage. And what we learn from 
him is that courage has very little to do 
with the brain, and very much with such 
simpler functions as circulation and diges- 
tion. And if, in this light, we re-examine 
the other figures standing out in low relief 
behind that of the captain, we find every 



256 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

one embodying some different form of 
courage, or lack of it. 

In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" the 
real hero is not Jimmy > the colored giant 
who deceives the others only to die self- 
deceived, but the crew as a whole. As a 
crew it is divided within itself, not by man 
standing against man, but by the conflict 
of two antagonistic emotions within the 
breast of every man. The emotions in ques- 
tion are those of pity and cruelty — both 
thriving side by side in primitive man, but 
so that one of them marks the past out of 
which he is emerging, while the other one 
points toward the future that is his goal. 

In "Nostromo" the dominant quality, re- 
curring in every character except that of 
Mrs. Gould, is vanity. But to recognize 
this fact we must understand that vanity 
and ambition, pride and aspiration, repre- 
sent distinctions only of degree. Here as 
elsewhere what we call virtue began under 
forms that now look appallingly vicious. 
From the crude, childish greed for public 



JOSEPH CONRAD 257 

acclaim found in the glorious capataz de 
cargadores to that "ideal conception of his 
disgrace'' which Dr. Monygham had made 
for himself, or from the intellectual scep- 
ticism of a Decoud to the mystical material- 
ism of a Holroyd, may seem a far cry, in- 
deed — but even such distances can be 
bridged by evolution, just as they have been 
bridged by Conrad's inimitable art. 

A man who has looked so deeply and so 
shrewdly into the human heart might be 
expected to confess some social purpose. 
This Conrad will not do. He is the artist, 
the observer — not the judge or the reformer. 
Saints and knaves find equal justice at his 
hands, his one avowed object being to reveal 
man to himself. All political creeds look 
pretty much alike to him. Remedies for evil 
there may be — must be — but not in pro- 
grammes. Not even the sacred name of 
freedom can cast a spell over him. If there 
be any principle that to him appears hal- 
lowed, it is that of discipline — not the dis- 
cipline exerted by one man over another, 



258 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

but that which makes each man a master 
of himself. When this kind of discipline 
becomes universal, and particularly when 
it joins hands with sympathy and insight, 
with love and knowledge, then freedom will 
result automatically. In this faith of Con- 
rad's — if he is willing to admit it as such — 
must be sought the most plausible reason 
for his failure to grasp and convincingly 
present a single human type : the anarchistic 
enthusiast for liberty in the abstract. 

For religious and philosophical formula- 
tions he has little more use than for political 
programmes. But his pages overflow with 
true wisdom, with revelations that teach us 
how to live, not theoretically but practically 
— as when he tells us that "both men and 
ships want to have their merits understood 
rather than their faults found out." Even 
a man like Maeterlinck has little more to 
give in this respect — and with the Belgian 
dreamer's outlook on life Conrad has much 
in common. The bearing and basis of his 
own outlook of this kind Conrad has made 



JOSEPH COXRAD 259 

plain beyond his wont in "A Personal Rec- 
ord," where the following passage suggests 
at once an artistic and a philosophical creed : 
"The ethical view of the universe involves 
us in the last instance in so many cruel and 
absurd contradictions, amongst which the 
last vestiges of pity, hope, charity, and even 
of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that 
I have come to suspect that the aim of crea- 
tion cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly 
believe that its object is purely spectacular: 
a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, 
if you like, but in this view, and in this view 
alone, never for despair. Those visions, 
delicious or poignant, are a moral end in 
themselves. The rest is our affair — the 
laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the in- 
dignation, the high tranquility of a steeled 
heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle 
mind — that's our affair." 



TWO STUDIES OF ROBERT 
HERRICK 



THERE are writers with numerous 
volumes to their credit whose art may 
easily be summarized in a few lines. Robert 
Herrick is not one of them. And yet he 
cannot be called versatile in the accepted 
sense. From first to last, his production 
seems to have followed certain clearly de- 
fined lines, in form and thought and spirit. 
Though now and then venturing into the 
realm of verse, he is above all a writer of 
prose. And though from time to time he 
has put out charming short stories, his true 
field is undoubtedly the novel. Moreover, 
in this field most particularly his own, he 
adheres closely to a manner of narration 

260 



ROBERT HERRICK 261 

that had reached perfection even in his 
earliest books. Nor is it of any use to 
search his works for sudden changes of 
opinion, or for moods contrasting sharply 
against the prevailing temperamental back- 
ground. For nearly fifteen years he ap- 
pears, on the whole, to have been moved by 
the same spirit, the same outlook on life, 
the same conception of its deeper realities, 
the same intense craving to place the truth 
uppermost. Not as if I meant to say that 
he has not changed and grown, but his 
growth has moved him onward along lines 
distinctly foreshadowed from the first mo- 
ment he endeavored to gain the ear of the 
public. 

If it be found difficult, as I have found 
it, to characterize him in a few quick sen- 
tences, the cause of it must be sought mainly 
in the width of his horizons. To define him 
is, in a way, to define the American people 
itself. For among writers of recent times, 
living or dead, there is hardly any one who, 
in my opinion, has come nearer deserving 



262 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the epithet "national." In saying this, I 
am not having in mind the relatively 
subordinate fact that Herrick moves his 
scene from one end of the country to an- 
other, giving us in the same volume faith- 
ful pictures of New England and the West, 
of the big city and the man-starved country. 
He is national for no less reason than the 
full, free reflection of our vast American 
panorama on every page, in every sentence, 
of all his larger works. Like a true artist, 
he is always working in terms of individual 
life, placing before us a gallery of real men 
and women such as very few American 
writers can be credited with; but in what 
happens to these individuals we find mir- 
rored what is at the same time happening 
to the nation in its entirety. Strikes, panics, 
country-wide unrests, "booms" reaching 
from ocean to ocean, political and ethical 
fluctuations — these are present not only as 
painted backgrounds, hanging flatly and 
stiffly behind the moving creatures in the 
foreground, but as vital factors, affecting 



ROBERT HERRICK 2G3 

intimately the daily lives of the simplest and 
humblest. 

This being so, one might expect to find 
Herrick widely read and highly praised. 
But only one of his books, "Together," can 
be said to have met with a truly popular 
success. And among the critics he has 
gained his just dues only from a few dis- 
cerning spirits. Again I venture an ex- 
planation that has occurred to me. All of 
Herrick's novels show plenty of "action," 
even when that word is applied in the 
narrower sense which makes it almost 
synonymous with violence. His men and 
women live and love, fight and strive, suffer 
and rejoice. The problems and the motives 
that move them are strong and real. The 
sex note, so long dominant in all poetry that 
it has become indispensable, may be heard 
from one cover to another in his books. 
Business, nowadays the "theme" to which 
writers in the fashion turn with increasing 
absorption, is treated by him with unusual 
insight and insistency. But for all this the 



264 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

real happenings of each story lie within the 
dim confines of human souls. His novels 
are at bottom psychological : physical move- 
ments have value in them only in so far as 
they render visible the subtle movements of 
the spirit within. And I fear that our 
general reading public still lacks the in- 
tellectual passion that alone can end its 
timidity in the face of this deeper aspect of 
life. 

This man who deals so audaciously and 
so cunningly with the secret forces that push 
and hem not only our private but our public 
existencies is still young. Born in 1868 at 
Cambridge, Mass., Herrick has spent al- 
most all his life in the shadow of some great 
educational institution. A graduate of 
Harvard, he taught first in his own uni- 
versity and then at the University of Chi- 
cago, where he has been professor of 
English since 1893. Now and then it has 
been hinted that his art may have taken 
the better and larger share of his time and 
energy. But if my information be correct, 



ROBERT HERRICK 265 

he has the deepest respect and affection for 
his original profession, and he goes on teach- 
ing from year to year not merely to draw a 
salary, hut because he is devoted to the 
teacher's mission and has faith in his own 
ability to fill it. And I am told that he has 
from the first exerted a marked influence 
over the students with whom he has come in 
contact. 

Having always held that the author's 
private life tends rather to obscure than to 
illumine his art, Herrick has kept his own 
personality so scrupulously in the back- 
ground that hardly an item of the usual 
silly gossip has found its way into print. 
What little has become known of his private 
existence seems to show him capable of 
rising above his own idiosyncrasies to full 
and clear understanding of currents with 
which he has no inherent sympathy. He 
knows and loves every form of art, and some 
of the stories told about him indicate an 
almost uncanny sensitiveness to formal per- 
fection. Yet every one of his books may be 



266 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

regarded as a plea for an "ethical" rather 
than "esthetical" conception both of life and 
art. 

Beginning with "The Gospel of Free- 
dom," which appeared in 1898, every one 
of his novels would richly deserve a de- 
tailed analysis such as cannot come in ques- 
tion here. I have already referred to the 
dominant note of "nationalism" as opposed 
to our all too frequent and futile "localism," 
that runs through them all. Another note, 
no less prevalent, may be described as social, 
and as such it may properly be placed in op- 
position to that overweening demand for 
individual expression which was characteris- 
tic of so much literature belonging to the 
past century. This is the more surprising 
as Herrick himself seems at heart to be 
strongly individualistic both in his sym- 
pathies and his proclivities. Nothing but 
true insight can account for this conquest of 
innate tendencies — an insight that finds one 
of its most striking formulations in a sen- 
tence from "The Web of Life," where he 



ROBERT HERRICK 267 

says that: "In striving restlessly to get 
plunder and power and joy, men weave the 
mysterious web of life for ends no human 
mind can know." 

There is in this sentence also a distinct 
touch of mysticism that stands in sharp con- 
trast to the realistic means generally em- 
ployed by Herrick. And as we go on from 
novel to novel, we find this element more 
and more tangible, though never permitted 
to intrude itself to an extent that might ob- 
scure the everyday clearness of events and 
characters. Even Van Harrington, the man 
who began his career in the prisoner's pen 
of a Chicago police court, and whom we are 
permitted to follow to the doors of the 
United States Senate, has this to say of his 
own experience: "All my life has been 
given to practical facts, yet I know that at 
the end of all things there are no facts." 
In "A Life for a Life" this suggestion of 
vague, deep-lying realities, too subtle for 
clear formulation, swells into orchestral 
power, so that the whole work is colored 



268 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

by it and becomes intelligible only in so far 
as our own souls are open to its appeal. 

With this novel Herrick advanced beyond 
his naturalistic starting-point. There he oc- 
cupied ground which had been previously 
cleared by men like Ibsen, Tolstoy and 
Maeterlinck. It is an immense allegory, but 
not of the kind that Bunyan gave us. Rather 
there is a kinship with that Greek sculpture 
which distilled the all-human out of the fleet- 
ing humanity of the moment. Yet this art, 
which makes so strongly for the typical, 
is impressionistic at the same time, abandon- 
ing no whit of what the nineteenth century 
gained along these lines, and insisting 
sharply on the uniqueness of the individual 
moment. And it is in this tendency to com- 
bine apparently opposed and incompatible 
qualities that I seek the determining char- 
acteristic of the poetry still to come. 



II 

MY first brief estimate of Herrick's art 
was written in 1910, just after he had 
published "A Life for a Life." Since then 
he has given us only one more volume, "The 
Healer," which appeared late in 1911. It 
would not be enough to say that this novel 
disappointed me: it forced me to revise my 
conception of its author's position in Ameri- 
can letters. In the past I was strongly in- 
clined to think him the Moses destined to 
lead our literature out of its long desert 
wandering into the promised land of mature 
achievement and self-realization. Such a 
hope I dare hardly hold now. Herrick is 
still to me one of the foremost writers of 
fiction w T e have in this country — if not the 
foremost. He is one of the few on this side 
of the ocean who, in rank, approach men 
like Wells and Conrad and Galsworthy on 
269 



270 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

the other. I feel no desire to withdraw 
what I have said in praise of his work up 
to a certain point. But I have come to 
fear that the point in question may mark 
the crest of his possible achievement. For 
years to come he will undoubtedly go on 
writing big, fine books, as he has done in 
the past, and we shall continue grateful for 
each new one. His delicate craftsmanship 
and genuine psychological insight will as 
surely assert themselves in the future with 
no less power than in the past. Yet all 
this — and it implies a very great deal — can- 
not make up for a certain lack of faith with- 
out which further growth seems to me very 
doubtful. 

I find it hard to indicate the character 
of this faith with any degree of exactness. 
It is partly philosophical and partly reli- 
gious, yet not identical with any philo- 
sophical system or religious creed. It looks 
toward life in its entirety without neces- 
sarily calling for any systematized interpre- 
tation of life and its problems. Perhaps it 



ROBERT HERRICK 271 

is nothing but a sort of optimism, based on 
feeling rather than on thought, and willing 
to accept any degree of undesirability im- 
puted to life as it stands revealed to us 
for the moment. It is a belief in the future 
rather than in the present, a hope placed 
in coming generations rather than in those 
now occupying the world. It implies a trust 
in the power of man to wrest a final, satis- 
factory meaning out of even the most para- 
doxical and menacing aspects of human 
existence. It is a faith filled with humility 
and free from all fatuity. It is the faith 
which I believe will be forged by this cen- 
tury out of pangs and qualms and dread 
experiences compared with which all the 
sufferings of past ages must appear like 
those imagined sorrows that haunt man's 
infancy without ever seriously detracting 
from its bright dawn. And I believe that 
the United States will do more than any 
other country toward the shaping of this 
new faith, which will equally inspire its 
dreamers and its practical men. But be- 



272 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

cause he dares not trust himself to it, even 
in moments when its glory seems to hover 
over his hyper-sensitive soul, Herrick, al- 
though so much both of American and 
artist, does not seem to be the man whom 
it will be granted to bring the new day 
and the new race to ultimate self-revelation. 
For this failure on his part, life has to be 
blamed, and not he, as it is temperamental 
and wholly unrelated to willed effort of any 
kind. 

I can still recall how the reading of 
Herrick's earlier works, undertaken almost 
in the order of their appearance, thrilled me 
with a sense of continued, consistent growth. 
In "The Gospel of Freedom" I found him 
still groping and rather thin as to contents. 
But with "The Web of Life" he seemed to 
have discovered himself both in regard to 
manner and matter. Thence he pushed 
steadily onward until a climax was reached 
in "Together." This book is to me the 
supreme embodiment of the essential Her- 
rick. As we see him there, he appears ob- 



ROBERT HERRICK 273 

servant, tolerant and broadly interested in 
life's fundamental realities; but also a little 
too materialistic and sceptical, and for this 
reason somewhat inconclusive. To my mind 
"Together" will always remain one of the 
crowning glories of a thoroughly indigenous 
naturalism, which nevertheless shows plainly 
the fruitful inheritance of Dickens and 
Thackerajr, the moral impetus obtained 
from the Russians, and the sobering in- 
fluence of the great French novelists from 
Balzac to Maupassant. 

While reading "Together," I felt that 
only one more step would be needed to make 
its author one of the world's enduring story 
tellers. But I felt also that this step, if 
effective, could imply nothing less than 
the passing of boundaries inherent in the 
writer's own nature. The taking of this 
one additional step would, I felt, mean the 
accomplishment of the seemingly impossi- 
ble. Yet my first impression was, when "A 
Life for a Life" appeared, that such a step 
had actually been taken. Later I realized 



27* VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

that, while an effort of remarkable intensity 
had been made by the author to outstrip his 
own inherent conditionings, the effort had 
been, on the whole, unsuccessful. But the 
very shortcomings of the book seemed still 
to promise a conscious and lasting rise to 
levels theretofore visited only in rare mo- 
ments. The novel was vaguer in design and 
spirit than its predecessors, and it was less 
balanced in expression, but it was also 
braver and warmer and more human. 
Above all, it held so much more of that 
natural symbolism without which thought 
must always tend toward ultimate sterility. 
For once Herrick had tried as he knew best 
to surrender himself and his art to a mysti- 
cism that had now and then furnished a 
noticeable undercurrent in some of his 
earlier work, but of which he had until then 
seemed a little ashamed and distinctly 
afraid. 

The leopard had all but changed its spots. 
But the very limitations which made for 
success up to a certain point, while they 



ROBERT HERRICK 275 

were accepted, had proved fatal in this case 
of their attempted defiance. Though this 
caused me some misgivings at the time, I 
clung to my hopes on behalf of Herrick's 
future until I had read "The Healer." 
Then I bowed my head to what began to 
seem inevitable. In doing so, I may have 
been premature, seeing that Herrick is still 
in his forties. But the book marks more 
than a retrogression: it has the depressing 
aspect of being written to glorify not only 
the author's inherent restrictions, but the re- 
flection cast by these upon the surrounding 
world. It is the book of a man who has 
grown tired of aiming at the unattainable, 
and who for this reason seems inclined to 
quarrel with whomsoever might demand 
such aspirations of him. It is an apotheosis 
of spiritual faintheartedness, one might say, 
with not a trace left of any straining to- 
ward those sunlit heights that were so 
nearly reached in the previous book. But 
just on this account it is a very human work, 
startlingly personal in its revelation of the 



276 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

author's instinctive reactions and innermost 
disbeliefs. 

The central figure, which has given the 
novel its name, is a man possessed of an 
unusual gift, who has fled into the wilder- 
ness to redeem that gift from certain habits 
fatal to its exercise. In his refuge he is 
overtaken by destiny shaped as a young 
woman whose life is trembling in the 
balance. Her extreme need serves to reveal 
the unclouding of his gift. Other demands 
on it are met with increasing self-confidence 
and no thought of reward. Even in the 
wilderness, however, such feats suffice to 
create a reputation. The distant world of 
sophistications and artificialities hears of the 
man and wants to capture him for its own 
mean uses. For a time he holds it at bay. 
But love has bound him to the woman whose 
life he once saved, and she has come straight 
out of the world he scorns and fears. This 
world she has left for him, and with him 
she accepts the wilderness until the child 
arrives. Then the chain never quite dropped 



ROBERT HERRICK 277 

by the young mother is pulled in link by 
link. And through her the man is caught 
also. Before he knows what has happened 
to him, he is selling his gift for money, 
with the final result that it deserts him 
once more, and now for ever. A catastrophe 
sweeps away the spot where the memory of 
earlier freedom had helped to keep him 
captive, and he avails himself of this oppor- 
tunity to flee into another wilderness — that 
of a crowded, sordid city slum. His gift is 
gone, but his skill remains, and to the latter 
he adds a growing comprehension of what 
is required by such a gift as had been his. 
Armed with this new light, he sets out to 
develop in others the gift lost for ever to 
himself. 

If we brush aside minor details and rami- 
fications, we find at the bottom of this story 
a triangular conflict reaching beyond the 
individual characters. In the final analysis 
it involves man and woman and the world 
in which they have to live. But the third 
of these factors, the world, has a double 



278 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

aspect, as civilization in general, and as the 
specialization of it which makes up a man's 
professional environment. With Herrick's 
criticism of either one of these aspects I 
have little fault to find, though it is fre- 
quently more onesided than the dramatic 
tension of the story demands. When deal- 
ing with the shortcomings of the medical 
profession in particular, he has been led to 
"commit himself," both in diagnosis and 
remedial suggestions, to an extent quite un- 
common to him. There is not the least 
doubt in his mind that the poison paralyzing 
the noblest activity of that profession is its 
increasing commercialization — that, under 
existing conditions, it is hopelessly cursed 
by "the base bargain of money for life." 
Speaking of the vast uninspired member- 
ship he says that "they are exploiting the 
human body and the human soul for private 
profit." And the one remedy he can sug- 
gest against this "prostitution" of the 
physician's calling is that "all medicine, all 
attempt at healing, should be institutional- 



ROBERT HERRICK 279 

ized," so that "medical service should be free 
for all, provided by society as a whole for 
its own preservation and betterment." It 
is the remedy recommended by Bernard 
Shaw in his preface to "The Doctor's 
Dilemma," and one that is more and more 
coming to be considered inevitable by social 
students. From Shaw the proposition of 
such a remedy comes naturally as a part of 
his general acceptance of socialism as the 
one way out of our present evil state. From 
Herrick it comes as a sign of rare self-con- 
quest, for his instinctive tendency would be 
to draw back from anything connected with 
an "ism" as from contagion. 

Hardly less bitter, but a great deal less 
precise, is Herrick's arraignment of the part 
played by civilization in its entirety as a 
retarding medium through which genius 
literally has to fight its way toward some 
sort of fulfillment that is sure to fall short 
of its inherent possibilities. Of course, every 
one knows that almost all human institutions 
and most human beings are expressly de- 



280 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

signed to delay the process of change which 
in retrospect is seen as progress. But on 
the part played by all such resistance as a 
selective principle Herrick has bestowed 
small, if any, attention. And in this con- 
nection he gives one of the most typical 
illustrations of what I have called his 
"spiritual faintheartedness." Strindberg's 
eager acceptance of conflict as life's main 
attraction is wholly foreign to him. He 
bewails the conflict between genius and the 
world not only because it is distasteful to 
him in itself, but because he seems to look 
upon the Tightness of it as resting wholly 
with one of the parties to it. 

Whether pitched against woman directly, 
or against the civilization of which, in 
Herrick's view, she is the sole creator, man 
has the right on his side, and his justifica- 
tion springs from his mission as life's agent 
of perfective development. There is truth 
back of this view, but it is too onesided by 
far, and it shows a lack of penetration — or 
perhaps of the courage needed to realize 



ROBERT HERRICK 281 

that progress is gradual and devious, so that 
often the enforced compromise which at first 
glance appears like a surrender of all ideals 
may, on closer scrutiny, reveal itself as a 
means for the firmer establishment or more 
effective embodiment of those very ideals. 
And in his regrets at the enslavement of 
genius by economical necessities, Herrick 
fails to question how many of the world's 
masterpieces would have remained un- 
created if no external factor had pressed 
upon their creators that compromise which, 
unfortunately, remains inseparable from 
every outward materialization of an inward 
vision. It is with strange feelings, indeed, 
that I notice how nearly identical Herrick's 
attitude on this particular point is with the 
orthodox Marxian socialist's outcry against 
any proposition to give him less than all he 
wants. 

Where Herrick fails most strikingly, 
however, and most saddeningly, is in his 
view on woman and her relation to man's 
experimental proclivities. As seen by him, 



282 VOICES OF TO-MORftOW 

the civilization she is charged with having 
made does not mean order placed in com- 
plementary juxtaposition to progress, but 
only material comfort opposed to spiritual 
freedom. The falseness of this view does 
not depend so much on the part he assigns 
to woman, as on his failure to grasp the 
ultimate purpose of that part as well as 
the fact that she is playing it not by choice, 
but under the compelling direction of life 
itself. He sees that she likes to "shop," 
that she is emotional to the verge of senti- 
mentality, and that she is prone to turn her 
look backwards. That her "shopping" may 
be a modern equivalent for her more primi- 
tive tendency to collect and produce useful 
things, he does not see — or he disregards 
such an interpretation, if it has occurred to 
him. All that he does is to contrast the 
qualities just mentioned with man's for- 
ward glance and predominant intellectuality 
— and out of mere difference he draws 
an excuse for condemnation so sweeping 
that it precludes any serious attempt to 



ROBERT HERRICK 283 

comprehend and explain. That, if she 
were what he wants her to be rather 
than what she is, woman might fail in 
the mission assigned to her by life as the 
human factor making for order and con- 
creteness, seems almost unthinkable to 
him. 

Yet he is not as blind as he permits him- 
self to appear at times. All his women are 
not soft things, bent above all on cuddling 
in front of a luxurious fireside. One of 
them has the hardihood to assert that "the 
time will come when single women like me, 
who work as men work, will have the 
courage to love and bear children if they 
need to — and men will respect them." An- 
other one, own daughter to the Healer him- 
self, is quite masculine in her contempt for 
the softer side of life, and also in her passion 
for perfective achievement. And the author, 
speaking in his own person, is forced to 
admit that "the world has slowly struggled 
forth from the squaw era, and must perforce 
accord more and ever more rights to these 



284 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

bearers of the sacred seed, however unfitted 
they may be at present for their liberty and 
self-direction." He sees that the old is 
dead, but he dares not hail the new as king. 
He sees the truth, however vaguely, but he 
dares not draw the right conclusions from 
it. It means, I think, that Herrick is emo- 
tionally conservative and cannot but hate 
the necessity for movement occasioned by 
his intellectual recognition of serious short- 
comings in our present social organization. 
There is a pitched battle ever raging be- 
tween his vision, which tells him we cannot 
stay where we are, and his feelings, which 
recoil from the unknown, and so it is but 
natural that he should land in pessimistic 
resignation as the one way of bearing life. 
But resignation without a constructive pur- 
pose back of it is the last thing that could 
appeal to the spirit of this new-born cen- 
tury. 

W. B. Yeats has furnished me with an 
excellent illustration of the possibility to 
observe in woman all that Herrick has seen, 



ROBERT HERRICK 285 

without being similarly frightened or re- 
pelled by it. "Strange paradox of the 
woman nature," Herrick cries in one place: 
' 'to seek the normal and sigh for the 
supernal, to lap herself in comfort and 
dream of the stars." But Yeats, having the 
self-same facts in mind, is merely moved 
to speak smilingly of "woman, who, perhaps 
because she is wholly conventional herself, 
loves the unexpected, the crooked, the be- 
wildering." In one sense these two passages 
are identical; in another sense they are 
antithetical. For when Herrick stops with 
an accusation, Yeats goes on to an explana- 
tion. And the basis of it is just that con- 
ception of all being as a seemingly destruc- 
tive, but actually constructive, interaction 
between complementary opposites, which I 
regard as one of the main keys to life's many 
riddles. But to perceive universal existence 
in this light is impossible without faith, and 
once more I must repeat that faith is just 
what Herrick lacks — or, to be more exact, 
he lacks the spiritual courage needed to ac- 



286 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

cept a faith that in the end might prove a 
delusion. 

On this fact, did it pertain only to Her- 
rick himself, I should not harp with such 
insistency. But I have long ago indicated 
the extent to which I hold his case typical, 
when I named my earlier study of his work 
"The Americanism of Robert Herrick." 
Then I used the word "Americanism" in 
a wholly approving sense. Now I feel com- 
pelled to use it more ambiguously. For it 
is in his faults no less than in his merits, in 
his inhibitions no less than in his impulses, 
that Herrick appears to me one of the most 
national of our living writers. There are 
two currents at work within this people: 
one emotional and idealistic ; the other scep- 
tical and materialistic. The manifestations 
of the former current range all the way 
from such Utopian dreams as the Brook 
Farm experiment to such practical efforts 
for betterment as the progressive move- 
ment of the last few }^ears. The second cur- 
rent has given us men like Mark Twain 



ROBERT HERRICK 287 

and Charles A. Dana, but it has also made 
possible such organizations as our various 
local or national "machines." The idealistic 
current is the natural expression of a young 1 , 
healthy, and on the whole happy nation 
when it turns into itself for light and in- 
spiration. The sceptical current results 
from such a nation's comparison of itself 
with more sophisticated human aggregates; 
and while it is no less needful than the 
other one, its immediate product is often a 
fear on the part of the young and still some- 
what uncouth nation to "be itself." On the 
other side of the ocean the outcome of 
this fear is often spoken of as "American 
cynicism," and not entirely without war- 
rant. For just this kind of excessive dread 
at being "taken in" is what leads so easily — 
in men as in nations — to a quick sneer at 
anything and everything which may possibly 
serve as a trap. 

It is, after all, strange to find such a 
tendency operative in a man of Herrick's 
calibre and character. Some might hasten 



288 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

to ascribe it to his life-long academical en- 
vironment, but I need only mention a few 
names, like those of William James, William 
Vaughan Moody and William Lyon Phelps, 
for instance, to invalidate any such con- 
clusions in advance. The weakness — if 
weakness it be, as I have dared to assume — 
may prove innate and irresistible, as "The 
Healer" has caused me to fear. But it is 
also possible, in spite of all I have said so 
far, that it may prove, to some extent at 
least, the momentarily exaggerated result 
of influences that will disappear after a 
while. And I am as anxious as ever to hope 
that this will prove the case. The years 
through which Herrick has been passing — 
those of the middle forties — are almost in- 
variably critical in the lives of largely gifted 
men. And I feel practically certain that 
some sort of mental crisis has cooperated 
in making "The Healer" what it is. If I 
be right in this, then the issue must remain 
in doubt until the crisis is ended. Thus 
I am led to conclude in a vein of optimism 



ROBERT HERRICK 289 

that may seem contradictory of what I have 
said before, but as it places me on the hope- 
ful side of the problem involved, I do not 
regret it. 



THE GREATER EDITH WHAR- 
TON 

THE Berkshire region, with the north- 
western part of Connecticut counted 
in, is one of the most attractive in the 
country. Its rolling, forest-clad hills and 
willow-screened valley nooks, its sheltered 
lakelets and meandering rivers, draw seekers 
of peace and of pleasure from all the 
Eastern money centres. These visitors 
speak glowingly of the early summer's pale 
serenity, of the fall's rapturous color riot, 
of glittering, almost graspable harvest 
moons, and of white, fleecy clouds sailing 
the tender blue of the sky from one som- 
brely smiling hilltop to another. 

Yet this is a tragic country — tragic be- 
cause of what it has done to the men choos- 
ing it for their home. In spite of that very 
beauty by which it tempted and trapped the 

290 



EDITH WHARTON 291 

first settlers, it is essentially a barren coun- 
try, made for show rather than for use. In 
desperate struggle with its cutting winds, 
its snow-smothered winters, and its stony 
soil, one of the bravest populations any land 
could boast has slowly gone down to defeat 
and destruction. It is a death-doomed 
people, drained of its vitality by disease and 
emigration, rendered anemic and lethargic 
by the harshness of its lot, and withered as 
a branch severed from the trunk. 

This is the country which Mrs. Wharton 
lias chosen as setting for one of her recent 
novels, "Ethan Frome." And as we look 
at it with the keen vision that is hers, the 
ancient spinners of fate become transformed 
into those modern Norns whom we have 
named Climate, Soil and Race. The thread 
of events used by Mrs. Wharton for her 
purpose is of the slimmest and simplest. 
Ethan Frome is the last sprout of a char- 
acteristic Berkshire family. At twenty- 
eight he has been worn down to the resigna- 
tion of an old man. He has seen first one 



292 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

and then the other of his parents yield up 
reason and life under the blows of a fate 
that must be held logical rather than un- 
kind. He has seen the inherited hillside 
farm run dry as an old cow. Panic-stricken 
by the hemming solitude, he has clutched at 
the one human being that ever showed a 
willingness to share his fate; and thus he 
has become saddled with a wife seven years 
his senior — a dyspeptic, self-centred, unlov- 
able being with a genius for imaginary in- 
validism and a passion for patent medicines. 
Into this blighted and blighting home comes 
a young girl with a pretty face and a soft 
heart — not an extraordinary girl, but one 
whose main charm lies in a desire to give and 
get sympathy not uncommon in youth when 
sundered from all its natural ties. 

Love steals into the hearts of these two. 
And at the same time the older woman's 
heart grows increasingly heavy with a 
jealousy that is not rendered less bitter by 
its failure of open expression. Step by 
step, yet within a brief space and without 



EDITH WHARTON 293 

introduction of a single useless detail, the 
author reveals love and jealousy growing 
apace, until at last the fatal moment of open 
clash can no longer be avoided. The girl 
is sent away by the wife. Ethan plans to 
go with his love toward a new life in the 
West. This plan is checked not by any 
conscientious scruples, but by poverty — by 
actual inability to raise the small sum needed 
for travelling expenses. 

Spurred into undisguised defiance, he in- 
sists on driving the young girl down to the 
railroad station in person. At the moment 
of separation utter despair floods their 
hearts. They are standing at the top of the 
snow-carpeted hill down which they had 
hoped to go coasting together some moonlit 
evening. There is a sled left behind by de- 
parted merry-makers. The course is made 
dangerous by a big elm standing too close 
to its most difficult turn. Down the glassy 
smoothness of that hill the two lovers glide 
together in search not of pleasure but of 
a common death. And under the firm 



294 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

pressure of Ethan's heel, the sled speeds 
straight into the menacing tree trunk. 

Few features of this remarkable book 
stand out more strikingly than its general 
design, by which the author has managed 
to satisfy at once our craving for surprise 
and our dislike of too much surprise. From 
the very start the shadow of that final 
"smash-up" lies over the pages of the book. 
We know that everything else must lead 
up to it. We know that Ethan himself 
is to come out of it as a man crippled and 
cursed forever afterward. And we know 
also that he must return to Zeena, the wife, 
and that the ruinous purchases of quack 
remedies will go on as before. But what of 
the second traveller on that sled speeding 
toward the consummation so often denied 
to the few that seek it? What of Matt? 
Not a word is said in advance as to her fate. 

And so, when the teller of the story, the 
young engineer from the outside, having 
discovered and told all the rest, at last by 
a conspiracy of circumstances finds his way 



EDITH WHARTON 295 

into Ethan's home — otherwise closed to all 
the world but the owner — the shock of what 
the visitor discovers there leaves an im- 
pression on the reader's mind rarely equalled 
in the annals of fiction. For there, in the 
bare, inhospitable kitchen, where Zeena 
once brooded over her jealousy and Matt 
huddled her love — there the visitor meets 
both of them alive. Matt as a peevish, 
helpless, narrow-featured invalid with a 
broken back, and Zeena as a resigned, dull- 
hearted nurse. And there Ethan has to live 
the rest of his spoiled life between those two 
spectres of his lost hopes: the woman he 
needed and the woman he loved. All other 
tragedies that I can think of seem mild and 
bearable beside this one. What is death, 
or sorrowing for the dead, in comparison 
with a life chained to the dead remains of 
what might have been love? 

Even to a mere reader such an outcome 
might seem unendurable — not to be born 
in mere print, as a tale told rather than 
an experienced fact — but for one considera- 



296 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

tion. And this one redeeming factor as- 
serts itself subtly throughout the book, 
though Mrs. Wharton never refers to it 
in plain words. It is this: that, after all, 
the tragedy unveiled to us is social rather 
than personal. It is so overwhelming that 
the modern mind rebels against it as a 
typical specimen of human experience. 
And if it had no social side, if it implied 
only what it brought of suffering and sor- 
row to the partakers in it, then we could 
do little but cry out in self -protective im- 
patience: "Sweep off the shambles and let 
us pass on!" As it is, and because that 
social aspect asserts itself so irresistibly, we 
are led into almost overlooking what those 
crushed lives must have meant to those liv- 
ing them. 

Ethan and Matt and Zeena are, indeed, 
as real as men and women can become in 
a book. But just because we see them thus, 
and because their common fate is so in- 
sufferably pitiful, that process of mental 
cauterization by which life guards itself 



EDITH WHARTON 297 

ajjainst too rude shocks sets in even while 
we are reading. Just as we could not live 
on if we were not mercifully permitted to 
forget certain pains that have shot across 
our own fields of consciousness, so we are 
here instinctively moved to "shake off" the 
thought of Ethan and Matt and Zeena as 
individual sufferers. They become instead 
embodiments of large groups and whole 
strata; and the dominant thought left be- 
hind by the book is not concerned with the 
awfulness of human existence, but with the 
social loss involved in such wasting of 
human lives. 

"Ethan Frome" is to me above all else 
a judgment on that system which fails to 
redeem such villages as Mrs. Wharton's 
Starkfield. And I am not now preaching 
socialism in the narrower sense. I am talk- 
ing it in a sense in which it is being more 
and more accepted by those most fervently 
bent on orderly progress. I am pleading 
merely for the extension of certain forms 
of social cooperation and coordination — or 



298 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

call it simply organization — that have al- 
ready been found inevitable in many fields 
of human activity. If a little crew of 
wrecked sailors be cast up on some coral 
reef in midocean, we do not say that they 
deserve their fate, nor do we demand that 
they rely wholly on their own resources for 
escape. The moment we learn of their 
plight, we send a vessel to relieve them. 
And this we do not only for their sake but 
for our own — because we need those men 
to carry on the world's business, and because 
we do not want to discourage other men 
from engaging in their perilous trade. 

Those who dwell in our thousand and 
one Starkfields are just such wrecked 
mariners, fallen into their hapless positions 
by no fault of their own. And though 
helpless now, they need by no means prove 
useless under different conditions. Vessels 
should be sent to take them off their barren 
hillsides — or social effort should be em- 
ployed in making those hillsides fruitful 
once more. There is hardly an inch of 



EDITH WHARTON 299 

ground that has not its use of some kind — 
its paying use. There is hardly a human 
being, either, who cannot be rendered 
socially paying if given a chance. This we 
must learn ere the new day can be hoped 
for. 

Mrs. Wharton has wisely refrained from 
every attempt at pointing toward a solving 
way. All she has done — and all she was 
called on to do — was to reveal the presence 
of Starkfleld and its population of Fromes 
within a social body that should contain 
nothing but living and growing tissue. In 
doing this, and doing it with her usual 
exquisiteness of word and phrase and por- 
traiture, Mrs. Wharton has passed from in- 
dividual to social art; from the art that 
excites to that which incites. 

Glancing over the all too brief volume 
in retrospect, I can find only one point 
where it suggests a certain degree of failure, 
of growth still unachieved. With the build- 
ing of the tale as it now stands I can have 
no fault to find. It is against a certain lack 



300 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

of outlook, a certain onesidedness of con- 
ception, that I direct nry adverse criticism. 
And to what I say along this line, the author 
may, of course, reply that what I am wish- 
ing for did not fall within the scope of her 
plan. And yet I wish it had ! 

Let me try to explain, though the task 
undoubtedly will prove hard — and let me 
be frankly personal in order to be wholly 
just. As I read the book now, I come away 
with an impression that, in the author's 
mind at least, the one thing needed to change 
Ethan's life from a hell to a heaven would 
have been the /ull and free expression of 
his love for Matt. Had Zeena died and 
Matt married him, then, I am made to feel, 
the barren farm of Ethan might have 
blossomed once more; the strangled dreams 
of his youth might have ceased to harass and 
haunt his soul ; nay, life in its entirety might 
have changed its face. 

This is the very thing which poets through 
the ages have been tempting man to believe. 
It is the very thing which I cannot accept 



EDITH WHARTON 301 

as a true interpretation of life's reality. 
Love is not a cure-all capable of righting all 
wrongs in an ill-managed world. It is an 
appetite, if you please; or, if so it please 
you better, it is a spiritual force springing 
from one of life's most material aspects. 
But at any rate it is a necessity — one of 
several — and as such it is bound to work 
havoc when not filled. But if, on the other 
hand, it be properly satisfied, then it reveals 
itself promptly as no end in itself, but a 
means to other ends — a prerequisite to the 
filling of new and no less essential neces- 
sities. We need love to live properly, but 
we can no more live properly on love alone 
than we can do so on bread. 

Romantic love, as idealized for us by our 
sentimental-minded forefathers, has long 
ago gone into bankruptcy. Henrik Ibsen 
sat as judge in the case, and George Ber- 
nard Shaw was appointed receiver with full 
power to reorganize the failing concern. 
And so it is becoming more evident with 
every passing day that the race of pale 



302 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

youths and slender-waisted maidens who 
took or lost their own lives because of 
"unrequited love" never really belonged to 
this world. 

Of course, if you have no soul-dominating 
interest to focus your activities, and you 
happen to pick up such an interest in the 
shape of a love dream, however silly or 
commonplace, and fate wakes you prema- 
turely out of your sweet dream, then you 
are very likely to sink back into something 
much worse than your previous state of 
comparatively harmless inanition. But if, 
on the other hand, all your faculties are 
normally employed; if each day brings you 
new problems to solve, and if life does not 
deny you every means of applying your 
solutions, then the same kind of love dream, 
ending in pretty much the same way, may 
change but not mar the rest of your life. 
It will then serve as an added impetus to- 
ward activities already dear to your heart. 
The law of compensation will assert itself — 
energy will be transmitted instead of wasted 



EDITH WHARTON 303 

— and life will go on even more effectively, 
though perhaps less placidly than before. 

Had Zeena died and Matt married Ethan 
— well, it is my private belief that inside of 
a few years life on that farm would have 
been practically what it was before Matt 
arrived, with Matt playing the part of a 
Zeena II — different, of course, and yet the 
same. For the life in our Starkfleids is 
cursed or saved not by this or that single 
incident, not by the presence or absence of 
this or that individual. "Most smart ones 
get away," says the old stage driver in Mrs. 
Wharton's book. The curse lies in staying 
there, in breathing the crushing, choking 
atmosphere of Starkfieldian sterility. 

Ethan was doomed when he did not get 
away as a boy. Having returned and 
stayed for a certain length of time, his life 
was no longer susceptible to more than 
momentary alleviation. And a forewarn- 
ing of this fact I read out of Mrs. Whar- 
ton's repeated references to Matt's physical 
frailty — a state of mind and body certain 



304 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

to have made her an easy victim of the 
Starkfield atmosphere even if no "smash-up" 
had been the cause of her stay within it. 
A few weeks or months of complete sur- 
render to love's bliss would to Ethan have 
been what the grog is to the fainting stoker 
in the ocean steamer's boiler-room. That 
grog may bring temporary relief, it may 
save life, and it may even carry with it a 
quick sting of pleasure, but it cannot turn 
stoking into a wholesome or pleasurable 
task. And life in a place untouched by the 
onward sweep of the world, especially when 
lived by individuals soured and weakened 
by a too long and too hard struggle against 
conditions unfit for any human being, is 
nothing but another form of stoking. For 
saying which each present Starkfield in- 
habitant will probably rise up and curse the 
rash critic. 



MAN'S BEGINNING AND END 

OF course, the how as well as the when 
of man's first emergence out of 
brute animality lies hidden in the mists of 
primal day. And no more do we know at 
what time or under what circumstances 
humanity as a whole may pass out of being. 
But every so often science makes a guess at 
both problems — than which there are few 
more tempting to the human mind — and 
where the scientist's scales and figures fail, 
there the poet's fancy steps in and completes 
what by the former was barely suggested. 
Contributing to these flights of fancy, a 
Danish novelist and a Russian playwright 
have undertaken to portray the beginning 
and the end of man. 

Basing their far-reaching dreams on the 
very last words of modern physics, biology 
and sociology, these two European writers 
305 



306 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

have audaciously ventured into the paths 
once trod so gloriously by John of Patmos 
and Milton. The novelist is Johannes 
V. Jensen, whose sound learning and vivid 
narrative powers have assured his books a 
vogue far beyond the borders of his native 
country. The dramatist is Valerius Brjus- 
soff, whose sombre, yet always noble and 
never morbid, genius has won him recogni- 
tion in Germany at least, though his name 
here is practically unknown. 

In a novel named "The Glacier," Jensen 
has tried to picture how man first became 
man in the true sense of the word — and the 
dominant idea of his book is that not 
pleasant ease, but struggle under the 
hardest kind of necessity was what finally 
raised man above the brute plane on which 
he probably dwelt while the northern parts 
of the globe were still covered with tropical 
vegetation and knew only one season — 
eternal summer. 

The play by Brjussoff that balances and 
complements Jensen's novel is named 



BEGINNING AND END 307 

"Earth Wreck" and pictures dramatically 
the closing scenes in mankind's long and 
glorious career — scenes that by a last flaring 
up of human courage and human genius are 
turned from ignominious decay into tragical 
catastrophe. 

In thus surveying man's earliest and last 
days within the span of two small volumes, 
one is struck by the presence of certain 
common ideas, although these ideas may 
figure quite differently in the drama and in 
the novel. Tools made by man play a con- 
spicuous part in the Danish work, but there 
we see them slowly and painfully emerging 
under the pressure of immediate need. 
Just because they are so poor, so tentative, 
so hardly won, man is their master. 

On the other hand, the background 
against which "Earth Wreck" is painted is 
a conquest of material nature so complete 
that the machinery by which man's existence 
is sustained seems to work almost without 
the aid of its creator. It had been started 
when man stood at the very apex of his 



308 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

power; it runs on when we see him in his 
hour of final decline — and we feel that it 
will go on moving long after the last man 
has drawn his last breath of vanishing air. 
And just because of its perfection, this ma- 
chinery seems to rule man rather than to 
be ruled by him. 

Still more interesting become the points 
of contact between the novel and the play 
if we turn from the physical to the spiritual 
plane. As in the opening chapters of "The 
Glacier" we behold the semi-human group 
out of which the symbolical first man 
emerged, we find the most characteristic 
trait of its members to be thoughtlessness — 
a certain aimless drifting whither the winds 
of heaven and the moods of the moment 
happen to tend. Again, turning to the 
play, we see and hear anemic men and 
women loll and chatter and drift, knowing 
nothing of a set purpose or of a w T ill put 
through in face of a hostile universe. Man, 
ere he became man, was a child, and a child 
he must become once more ere he die his 



BEGINNING AXD END 309 

final death, these two dreamers seem to say 
in unconscious unison. 

Together with a steadily growing number 
of scientists, historians, and philosophers, 
Jensen believes that the cradle of civilized 
mankind — which to him means the Aryan 
races — stood in or near the so-called Baltic 
basin, probably in the middle and southern 
parts of Sweden. But in the catastrophe 
embraced in what is generally named the 
Glacial Period — the covering of all North- 
ern Europe with a deep mat of ice and snow 
— he sees not a hindrance to mankind's 
further development, but its true beginning. 
Until then, during the Tertiary Period, the 
continent in question possessed the flora 
and fauna now shown by the equatorial 
regions — with this difference, however, that 
it was even more luxurious and varied, while 
showing less of that death-in-life, that 
strange flourishing of life right in the midst 
of decay, which is now so typical of our 
tropics. In those days European man lived 
from hand to mouth, picking his food as 



310 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

he went along and having no reason to 
develop forethought or purpose. And be- 
cause such thought as he had was not pro- 
jective — because it did not lead him to 
steadfast pursuit of a goal seen far in the 
distance — it could hardly be called thought 
at all. 

Then began that change which altered the 
surface of the whole northern hemisphere — 
and perhaps the history of the entire globe. 
Where perennial sunshine had reigned, 
where evenly tempered heat had made all 
life thrive beyond any dreams of ours, there 
clouds began to hide the blue of the sky, 
the earth became wrapt in gloom, rain 
poured forth as if to deluge whatever there 
was of life, and the stated rotation of the 
seasons began — but began with what was 
practically the substitution of everlasting 
winter for endless summer. 

Primitive man suffered, but did not reason 
about his sufferings. Step by step he fell 
back before the oncoming Arctic winter. 
League by league he yielded up the ground 



BEGINNING AND END 311 

that lie should ever afterward recall as the 
Eden of his primal period. The introduc- 
tion to "The Glacier" shows us the rear- 
guard of such a retreating horde. In this 
rear-guard, however, there is one man who 
differs from the rest. His name is Dreng — 
which is only the old Norse name for "young 
man." He belongs to the favored f amity, 
whose duty and privilege it is to tend the 
sacred fire — the fire which the legendary 
ancestor of that family was said to have 
snatched from the edge of the volcano. If 
this fire be extinguished there is no way of 
relighting it. 

At night, while the rest of the little band 
sleeps, Dreng guards and feeds the fire. 
The rain is falling all around him. The 
virginal forest is astir with sounds not only 
of the northern wind that is breaking its 
trees, but of wild beasts on the march to- 
ward milder climes. The life of that part 
of the continent is doomed. Some of the 
wild creatures — most of them — flee before 
the cold and are saved. A few, like the 



312 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

sabre-toothed tiger and the cave lion, stay 
and perish. 

The difference between Dreng and the 
rest is that he remembers where the others 
forget; that he inclines to resist where they 
incline to yield. At the fire he is shaping 
his rude flint weapon, and that, too, stirs 
dreams in his crude mind — dreams of a 
weapon better than anybody has ever seen. 
In other words, Dreng is a natural freak; 
he represents one of those leaps which 
nature now and then takes into the future 
— we call them by the name of genius nowa- 
days. 

To Dreng, sitting there at the fire, listen- 
ing to the roar of the wind and the tramp 
of the beasts, it seems that some person, 
some being like himself, some unseen enemy, 
must be behind the changes that are forcing 
them farther and farther away from the 
homes once occupied in such happy uncon- 
cern. And his dawning thought leads him 
to go in search for that enemy. 

Preparing the fire so that it will last 



BEGINNING AND END 313 

until his return, he deserts his trusted post 
and leaves his sleeping, childlike comrades. 
Through the flooded forest, up the sides of 
the nearest hills he makes his slow way. 
For the first time he meets snow and ice. 
Everywhere he beholds disaster — but the 
being that causes the disaster cannot be 
found. He returns, finds the fire gone, the 
troupe vanished. And when he overtakes 
them he is stoned back as a traitor, an 
enemy. 

Made an outcast, Dreng turns northward. 
There is more anger than sorrow in his 
wildly stirring heart. And under the pres- 
sure of the mood, moved perhaps by his 
destiny, he starts straight into the heart of 
the winter. Hardship after hardship, one 
worse than the other, marks his aimless way. 
But he is still young, a giant of build, and 
with that strange new fire within that is to 
break into the full flame of a purposive will 
by and by. As Jensen pictures him, he 
resembles closely the reconstructed Nean- 
derthal man — with craggy brows and pro- 



3U VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

truding jaws, with arms reaching to the 
knees and hair covering every part of the 
body, but for all that an animal that no 
longer walks on all fours. 

Half-dead with cold, Dreng breaks into 
the hole of a hibernating bear. A battle 
of life and death follows between the in- 
truder and the aroused Bruin. Dreng, 
armed with his trusty stone axe — his sole 
weapon, so far — conquers, but not until he 
has lost one eye. For throughout his book, 
Jensen has connected the story with the old 
myths, and Dreng is Odin, Wotan, the 
First Father, the One-Eyed. And like 
Wotan, Dreng buys knowledge by the loss 
of his eye — the knowledge of clothes. For 
having slain the bear, and supped off his 
warm blood, he is driven by the cold to cut 
open the carcass and crawl into it for pro- 
tection. 

The next step is to flay off the skin and 
wrap it around the body. Then he bethinks 
himself of tying the bear's dangling paws 
under his own feet, so as to keep them from 



BEGINNING AND END 315 

being cut by the ice — and he has shoes. He 
learns to wrap the hides of smaller beasts 
about his legs, and to cut out narrow strips 
with which to tie them into place. He is 
clothed. 

As he lives thus, in lonely pursuit of 
whatever life is left on the icefields, two 
things stand out above all others and grave 
themselves on his consciousness. One is the 
ever-growing glacier which has taken the 
place of what was once the Scandinavian 
peninsula, and will be so once more in the 
fullness of time. The other one is the 
mammoth — the pachyderm that refused to 
yield before the cold, and that has now be- 
come the king of the icy wastes. 

In the north there is always the bright 
green glare of the glacier's advancing ice 
wall. And against the deep, blinking 
winter sky the titanic bulk of the mammoth 
is ever so often caught in monstrous sil- 
houette, swaying slowly back and forth, the 
very embodiment of self-sufficient loneli- 
ness. 



316 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

When the brief and wet summer comes, 
the birds and beasts seek back toward the 
old homes. The birds succeed, and establish 
those habits of migration that still last. The 
crawling and running things on the ground 
try in vain, and have to turn back — or if 
they push on, it is only to perish. 

In the meantime Dreng has acquired his 
first companion — a stray member of a pack 
of dogs that has shadowed his steps and 
shared his hunting. This one seems, like 
Dreng himself, to possess some spark 
brighter than any burning within the crania 
of the rest. From merely following the 
man's hunt he learns to take part in it, to 
do his share — but still only on sufferance. 
Between man and dog there is at first 
nothing but an armed truce, but gradually 
this grows into actual companionship and 
cooperation. 

Now and then the heart of Dreng is 
vaguely haunted by a craving for other 
men, and in the summertime he manages 
now and then to get far enough southward 



BEGINNING AND END 317 

to find some creatures like himself. But 
when he overtakes them they are just so 
much prey, and — he eats them. Once, how- 
ever, he hunts such a prey — one that looks 
different from the rest — and overtakes it 
only after a three days' pursuit. It is a 
woman. They meet on the shores of the 
ocean. And there the first monogamistic 
marriage begins. Moa she is called when 
the first children have come and given her 
a name. She returns with Dreng to the 
glacier, and from that moment the begin- 
ning of civilized humanity may be counted. 

As hunting and slaying is the main in- 
stinct of Dreng — besides making weapons 
for the hunt — so picking up things is the 
principal characteristic of Moa. By merely 
storing things out of curiosity or from some 
instinct like that moving rooks and crows, 
she learns to use grains and roots and fruits. 

The man's symbol is the axe. Hers is 
the basket. He makes his clothes out of 
hides as before and strings them together 
with strips of chewed hide. She gathers 



318 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

mammoth wool from the dwarf firs and 
weaves it crudely into a fabric more suitable 
to her nature. They live in caves or behind 
shelters rudely put together of rocks piled 
on each other. During the long winters 
dried meat and dried roots form their only 
food. 

But in the mind of Dreng lies the memory 
of the fire he used to guard. As the winters 
grow worse and worse, the prey scarce and 
scarcer, he seems almost seized with a mania 
to find that fire. There is one clue — the 
tiny sparks flying from the flints when he 
shapes his weapons. And one winter, the 
worst of all, he simply spends his time ham- 
mering stone after stone and dreaming that 
out of some of them the fire may come. 
And finally it comes. For he has happened 
to find a piece of iron ore at last, and as it 
strikes against the flint, sparks of a different 
kind — big, burning sparks — are scattered in 
every direction. 

The picture of Dreng dancing around the 
first fire really made by man and the visions 



BEGIXXIXG AND END 319 

seen by him in the following night, when he 
is too excited to sleep, form some of the 
best parts of this notable volume. But 
when Dreng begins to dance, Moa rushes 
in fright out of the rock house, and there 
she stands with inward-turned toes, staring 
in mixed surprise and pleasure, but on the 
whole rinding everything quite natural. 
"Her man, her god, had chosen to make the 
fire, and that was only to be expected, for 
what could he not do?" 

On the rocky island, in the midst of the 
glacier, where Dreng and Moa had found 
a refuge, there the sons end daughters of 
that first couple remain and increase. 
They do just what Dreng and Moa used 
to do. The descendants in a straight line 
of Dreng's eldest son are guardians of the 
fire stone, and as such they take toll from 
the rest, being at once chieftains and med- 
icine men. And very few changes occur, al- 
though they learn to keep reindeer for the 
sake of the milk. 

Thousands of years pass along. There 



320 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

has been another subtle change in the sea- 
sons. The winters are growing shorter, the 
summers longer and hotter. The rock 
island is overcrowded, and the privileged 
family is becoming more arrogant. Thus 
things conspire to produce another outcast, 
the second Dreng — Whitebear named — who 
is to take mankind away from the glacier 
and back to the regions where the ice is al- 
ready melting away. In this second leader 
we have the figure of Thor, the god of skill 
and of fertility. He and his wife, Vaar 
(Spring), settle down near where stands 
now Stockholm, and from there, through 
adventures that must be passed over here, a 
new start is made, the start that has given 
us the nations that rule the western world 
to-day. 

Whitebear, who builds the first ship and 
makes the first wagon, leads us logically up 
to that state of material perfection which we 
encounter in BrjussofT's play. How many 
millenniums from those first stumbling but 
fateful steps of Dreng to the opening scene 



BEGINNING AND END 321 

in "Earth Wreck," in the gorgeous, mys- 
tical Hall of the Blue Basin, who can tell? 
But that the line of development thus 
marked by its first and last stations is log- 
ical we can hardly doubt. 

And we are made to understand that, 
through millennium after millennium, man- 
kind grew and grew — in power and insight, 
in control of nature and of itself — until at 
last men had the whole earth in their hands 
as one immense tool. And at that supreme 
moment, with so much of the universe lying 
like an open book before them, the leaders 
of mankind saw that even a race like theirs 
must die. And they set out to postpone 
that fatal moment with all the miraculous 
skill at their command. 

They, too, have felt an approaching 
change, just as did the contemporaries of 
Dreng. But this time it consists in a steady 
thinning out of the terrestrial atmosphere. 
And they foresee the day when there shall 
not be enough air left on the earth for any 
creature to live in. By that time the whole 



322 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

surface of the earth is covered by men, liv- 
ing together in cooperation based on in- 
sight rather than on sentiment. To move 
them all as one body is possible and other 
creatures there are none to count with. 
Food is obtained artificially, and so the 
thought of making all life artificial except 
the breeding of new men comes quite easily 
to them. 

Digging down and building up, they es- 
tablish a kind of shell for the earth. There, 
in several stories, gloriously housed, man- 
kind lives. Within that shell there is air 
enough, artificially made or renewed. Out- 
side of it the atmosphere may disappear as 
fate has decreed it must ; mankind will live 
on for all that. Water and light and food 
are produced by machines that take their 
motive power from the internal heat of the 
globe — machines so perfected that they 
practically run themselves. Thus the in- 
evitable is postponed, but not disposed of. 

Housed in that shell, with every material 
need carefully provided for, mankind begins 



BEGINNING AND END 323 

to atrophy, to wither. Births decrease, the 
race degenerates slowly without knowing it, 
and its numbers fall off. Thus perhaps 
thousands of years pass again — and prob- 
ably nothing is more characteristic of those 
years than the slow but steady blunting of 
man's will, of his power of concentrated at- 
tention, of his capacity for dogged perse- 
verance. The accumulated spiritual treas- 
ures are by decrees reduced to dead letters, 
until they are quite forgotten. Here and 
there only a sage with his circle of scholars 
maintains the old traditions, the old learn- 
ing, the old ambitions on behalf of humanity 
as the crown and glory of universal crea- 
tion. 

And thus is forgotten at last even that 
knowledge of ruthless facts which caused 
men to coat the earth with its triple shell of 
human habitations. Beyond the roofs of 
their halls nobody looks. That there is no 
air outside those roofs only one living man 
knows. As their numbers decline, those 
that survive gravitate toward the lower 



324 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

halls, nearer the heart of that earth which 
sustains them. There, in a deep-dug cen- 
tral shaft, are the central power generators 
that run and regulate the entire material 
part of their existence. That is to them the 
centre of life — but they have long ceased to 
know how to control those machines, and 
when the play opens, no one then living has 
ever looked upon the sun. 

A group of women lounging listlessly 
around the blue basin after which the hall is 
named — that is all we see in the beginning. 
There is no water in the basin. Other re- 
ceptacles have thus gone dry, until each 
group has to wander through as many as 
twenty halls to get what they need of water. 
That once pipes actually led the life-giving 
fluid right into their private rooms, they do 
not even remember. And the light is also 
going out in hall after hall. Still there are 
enough habitable places left for the three 
millions of human creatures that represent 
the whole race. 

The women talk without purpose — gos- 



BEGINNING AND END 325 

sip, love, private troubles — just as to-day, 
but in a much more anemic fashion. The 
Sage — earth's oldest living man — comes 
with his scholars. And then there is an out- 
cry. Somebody is brought in on the shoul- 
ders of his excited fellow-men. It is Ne- 
watl — the Dreng of the day. He has 
searched the old deserted halls and gal- 
leries. He has strayed on and on, moved 
by despairing realization of mankind's 
doom, until at last he has reached the upper- 
most story, and there — through a lofty win- 
dow — he has beheld the paling stars and the 
rising sun. 

Yes, the sun is still rising and setting, 
though men have not looked upon it for 
thousands of years. And now this man, 
who has seen the ever renewed, ever equally 
grand spectacle of the rising orb — this man- 
kind's last genius — cries that he has found 
the way to a rejuvenated race. It is the old 
cry of "back to nature," but here uttered 
with a new meaning. 

Others have seen and grasped the trend 



326 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

of humanity's downward drift. Others 
have fretted their hearts out over it and 
sought for remedies, and principally a 
strange man named Teotl — for all the fig- 
ures in this weird work bear names that 
bring our minds back to the old Aztecs of 
Mexico. Teotl is the head of the Order of 
the Liberator — a group of thirteen men and 
women who have made it their mission to 
bring mankind the one possible relief — 
death. Murder is their faith, and as one is 
caught at it and himself killed, a new re- 
cruit takes his place. Death is their god, 
and to death they sing hymns. He is the 
Liberator. 

But the cry raised by Newatl breaks up 
the order. Once more the hope of life — of 
life in its old fullness and richness — is awak- 
ened. Newatl has recalled that there is a 
mechanism provided for the raising of the 
roofs that cover their halls. And what he 
proposes is to open those roofs, to let in the 
air — the air that is not there — and to restore 
to mankind the vigor that springs only from 



BEGINNING AND END 327 

a life in close contact with all the forces of 
nature. 

The old Sage — Newatl's teacher — hears 
the cry, and in his heart it arouses quite an- 
other thought. He is the only one that still 
preserves the knowledge of what exists out- 
side of their own shell. But instead of 
warning the others of what the raising of 
the roofs will mean, he decides that thus — 
by a catastrophe that has something lofty 
and noble in its suddenness and complete- 
ness — mankind will be saved from that com- 
plete relapse into primitive brutishness 
which he is foreseeing. 

That is all. There is enough of action, 
of conflict between personalities, to make a 
real drama of it. But all this hardly con- 
cerns us here. Followed by Newatl, the 
man of the hour, and ten trusty scholars, the 
Sage penetrates to the deep-sunk rock 
chamber where the central power generators 
are located. Under his direction turns the 
cogged wheel that will raise the roofs from 
the uppermost halls. To those halls the 



328 VOICES OF TO-MORROW 

crowd has repaired, eagerly awaiting the 
hour of rejuvenation, and there idly gossip- 
ing or as idly quarrelling about what is to 
be done, they meet their fate together. 

It is a wonderful scene, that last one, 
where the sun breaks into the hall, and in its 
path comes death — not for one or a few, but 
for every living being within sight. Thus 
the Russian fancies the end of the race — 
brought about by what it still has of brain 
and heart, and rendered inevitable by the 
ruthlessly revolving cycles of evolution: 
from death to life and back to death again. 



JUL 2 1913 






